National Wire About Nigerians, Nigerian Business and Other Stories
Dayo Emmanuel
For effective governance and accountability in Nigerian communities, a 3-2-1 Mobile Governance Outreach has been launched in Lagos.
The 3-2-1 mobile governance is an initiative of ActionAid Nigeria, implemented in Lagos by media NGO, International Press Centre (IPC) under the Strengthening Citizens Engagement in Electoral Process (SCEEP) project which is supported by UKAID.
Rolling out the initiative to participants drawn from local communities in Ifako Ijaiye Local Government Area of Lagos State at Ogba, Lagos recently, SCEEP Project Officer, Sanmi Falobi encouraged community representatives to always work in unison to be able to track development efforts in their localities.
“If you want to make government accountable, you must work together in the communities,” Falobi said, adding that, “the project is aimed at helping communities to organize in order to engage political leaders in facilitating development projects in their various neighbourhoods. We are taking the efforts ahead by the introduction of the 3-2-1 Mobile Governance Outreach.”
The Mobile Governance Outreach enables community members to get information on good governance, rights, elections and budget, nutrition and healthy living, water, sanitation and hygiene, family planning, news and entertainment etc.
Explaining further, Falobi said “You never can tell how much impact that can be generated when people are empowered with information and how to use that information to demand development on issue in a community from government representatives. The government official must pause other less important engagements to attend to the need in that locality. This is one of the advantages of this mobile outreach scheme.”
Demonstrating how to access information from the mobile platform, Falobi said what it just requires is for any person registered on airtel mobile network, to just dial 321 and listen to the voice prompt to select whatever the issue or subject they would be requiring information on, noting that the first ten calls per month is free of charge.
He explained that the 3-2-1 is an addition to the SCEEP initiatives being implemented by IPC in conjunction with ActionAid/UKaid in 18 communities across 6 local government areas of Lagos.
The 3-2-1 is being introduced to compliment series of community empowerment and capacity building projects which have yielded results in the selected communities in Lagos State over the years.
