Daraja Development

Context

Daraja is based in Njombe, in Iringa region of Southern Tanzania. This helps to ensure that our work is deeply rooted in the life of rural Tanzania. Njombe and the surrounding area will act as a testing ground for our ideas before they are scaled up – either by Daraja itself or by partners.
Daraja translate the idea of accountability in the community level using three programmes; We use the following approaches.
1. Work with local government, so that officials are better able to respond to communities
2. Work with local communities, so that they are more aware of their rights and better able to hold government to account
3. Improve links between government and communities, creating opportunities for debate and discussion.

Website:
www.daraja.org

Area of Work:
Tanzania, Africa

Contact Person:
Sauli Giliard

Approaches to implementing Community monitoring/accountability

We believe that if the community is well inform, they can make follow-ups. Here the newspaper programme plays a vital role in informing the community and citizens takes initiatives to ask their local authorities. Also, government officials takes action hence becoming the responsive to the community.

Results and lessons

• We have learnt that local owned newspaper/media can foster accountability issues as citizens raises their voices and local government reacts. A vivid example is Transparency and Accountability Programme (TAP) where Daraja was conducting Community Score Card in Primary health services in rural setting. The results were published in our newspaper and spread to other national papers for advocacy purposes.
  
• The results were positive as local government reacted to solve problems raised by the programme.
  
• When community are well informed, they are in a good position to react by monitoring their entitlements