Public Participation and Social Accountability in Kenyan Counties: A Pilot Study Using Interactive Radio in Siaya (2019)

Srinivasan, S. & Diepeveen, S. et al. (2019). ‘Public Participation and Social Accountability in Kenyan Counties: A Pilot Study Using Interactive Radio in Siaya’, Africa’s Voices Foundation, Nairobi, Kenya.

There is a strong consensus amongst governance specialists that citizen engagement is integral to supporting social accountability and more broadly strengthening democracy. However, how to effectively provide for citizen engagement and social accountability is more ambiguous. The impact of the modalities through which citizens make demands on the degree to which citizens feel empowered to trigger recognition and action from the government remains an open question. 

This is especially the case in Kenya. In the eyes of many, the extent to which public participation has effectively led to greater social accountability and improved governance performance under the mandate of the new constitution is highly variable.

This pilot study involved implementing and studying an intervention, found in the approach of Africa’s Voices Foundation, a Kenya-based non-profit organisation. This intervention, the ‘Common Social Accountability Platform’ (CSAP for short) proposes to use interactive radio shows to achieve meaningful spaces of mediated public discussion between citizens and authorities that are valued by both and strengthens relations between them, whilst also providing evidence of citizen opinions in a form that supports policy action by authorities. Citizens’ opinions are collected from the radio discussions and analysed to provide ‘evidence’ of these opinions and how they vary between socio-demographic groups and over time.