Goal

To foster transparency and accountability, support democratic participation of civil society and strengthen inter-parliamentary cooperation in the Parliaments of Africa.

Parliaments are organisations that, in essence acquire, elaborate and disseminate information. Information is the lifeline of democratic participation. Parliaments and civil society in order to fulfill their responsibilities to the best of their abilities must have access to  parliamentary works and documents and have effective channels of communication.

The acquisition and management of information is the most critical expertise that African Parliaments need to develop. Increasing the effectiveness of information acquisition, elaboration, and dissemination, is the best way for a Parliament to significantly increase its capacity to make informed decisions in a transparent and participatory way.

This Project will focus on information and knowledge capacity building and intends to contribute to the strengthening of Parliaments in Africa as vital components of democratic societies and essential elements of good governance.

Objective

To empower African Parliaments with skills, services and applications that will allow them to become open, participatory, knowledge-based learning and participatory organisations. The modernisation of Parliaments and their transition into open, participatory, knowledge-based learning organisations will require the implementation of an articulated set of activities from enabling and supporting environments; to building human capacity and developing high quality value-added information services and document management applications for parliaments.

The Project will mainly focus on the development of capacity building activities and common services in the framework of the Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network (APKN). It will also directly assist national parliaments in adopting common standards and software applications.

APKN is the strategic partner of the Project and it is in and through the APKN mechanism that the Project will cooperate in the development of capacity building activities and shared information services and applications in ways that are currently not done in the parliamentary domain in Africa. The Project will have to adjust its Action Plan to coordinate with the priorities of APKN and support APKN activities, to the extent possible, in order to build sustainability, synergies and economies of scale.

The Project activities will concur to:

• build managerial and technical skills in parliaments.
• develop information and e-services tailored to the needs of African Parliaments to effectively meet the ever changing information needs of parliaments.
• deploy, develop and support applications based on open source and open standards to sustainability address the information management and dissemination requirements of parliaments.
• support the development of  a legal and regulatory framework for achieving an equitable and open Information Society.
• improve parliamentary development assistance co-ordination and integration in Africa in order to maximise the use of human and financial resources available.