AfriMAP - Africa Governance, Monitoring and Advocacy Project

AfriMAP was established in 2004, as an initiative of the Soros Africa foundations. AfriMAP aims to monitor and promote compliance by African states with the requirements of good governance, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. AfriMAP makes excellent use of Internet tools, in particular a Web site and accompanying eNewsletter, to raise awareness and share information about its work, and to make key documents and resources in multiple languages available through a searchable database.




Through its reporting and advocacy processes, AfriMAP provides civil society groups with a set of tools and improved capacity to hold their governments to account in relation to international and regional human rights standards they are party to. AfriMAP is currently working in five countries; Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal and South Africa, with plans in the pipeline to expand our geographic scope. AfriMAP is working with national civil society organisations to produce detailed reports that audit government performance in three thematic areas; the justice sector, political participation, and delivery of public services. The findings from the reports will be highlighted in advocacy at national and continental level for reform and improvement of government accountability and capacity. In addition, AfriMAP has begun work around the African Peer Review Mechanism Process (APRM), working with national partners in countries that have already undergone review, to examine the reporting processes that took place, including the extent to which they were consultative.

AfriMAP relies heavily on its Web site (www.afrimap.org) to raise awareness and share information about the work we are doing. One of our key objectives is to ensure that our methodological reporting tools and reports are easily available to a wide range of organisations and individuals, and the Web site allows us to do that. For instance, we have been approached by a civil society group in Cameroon, who after coming across AfriMAP on the web, are interested in adapting our reporting frameworks for their own use in Cameroon.

Our Web site also allows us to provide further services to practitioners working in the field. We are currently working on building up a library database of resources (articles, papers, key official documents) on the theme of good governance in Africa. We are cataloguing these resources according to region or country and keyword - so, for instance, a user interested in researching NEPAD could use the drop-down menus to select by 'NEPAD,' or someone interested in criminal justice in Kenya could search for 'criminal justice' and 'Kenya'. We believe that our database is a unique resource and that it should prove a very useful research tool -- especially for those battling with slow connection speeds or using costly Internet cafes, for whom a database searchable in this way may significantly speed up the process of finding relevant documents. We are adding new documents all the time, including those footnoted in the AfriMAP reports. If your organisation has any research you would like to include in AfriMAP's library, we would love to hear from you at info@afrimap.org.

Another section of our site displays news articles, taken from various sources including press releases of continental and international organisations, on issues relating to good governance in Africa, in particular on the African Union, NEPAD and the APRM. We also feature a call for papers, whereby we encourage viewers to submit papers on specific themes, with the aim of encouraging debate and new thinking. Our last call was on political participation in Africa, and the works of the three winners, from Ghana, Sierra Leone and Cameroon, will soon be published on the site. Previous essays, on the justice sector, are already displayed. We pay a small honorarium for winning entries. Visitors to the site can also sign up to a periodic newsletter that provides information updates on AfriMAP, including of new reports published.

Conceptualising and building AfriMAP's Web site (which launched last year) was a rapid learning curve. We began the process with a strong idea of what our objectives were, and based organisation of the site closely around those goals. Nonetheless, we still found that with some sections of the site, it was very difficult for us to understand fully what we needed until a few months after the site had gone live, and we had been using it for a while. If your organisation or project is embarking on building a site for the first time, we would definitely recommend building into your planning and budgeting, a stage allowing for reorganisation and refinement a few months after you go live. When designing your site, it is also important to take into account the daily reality most users on the continent face, of poor connection speeds. Sites need to be easy to navigate and user-friendly; for instance on the AfriMAP site, we will provide options to downloads our reports in sub-sections, so that users do not have to download huge documents, but can navigate directly to the parts they are most interested in. AfriMAP launched its French version Web site (www.afrimap.org/fr) a few months ago, and we have found it very important in reaching out to users across the continent. It does involve additional work to keep parallel language sites up to date, but the effort is worthwhile, and we have found that it is possible to recruit volunteer translators to help us out.

Overall, we have found our web presence an invaluable way of reaching out to a wide range of groups, and building networks amongst practitioners working on good governance.