TI Kenya conducted support visits in West Pokot and Turkana Counties from 30th May 2017 to the 8th of June 2017. The exercise was led by Sharon Mwangi from TI Kenya supported by social accountability officers from SIKOM and SAPCONE. The purpose of the visit in West Pokot was to pick on successes from the second phase of implementation of the social accountability project in both counties for replication and conduct public forums already identified locations in preparations for scaling up. The visit in Turkana County aimed at resolving grievances received from social auditors regarding late disbursements of their motivation fee. The team visited three social audit groups in West Pokot and three social audit groups in Turkana.
The support visits gave an opportunity for social auditors to express challenges they were facing and give practical recommendations of dealing with the challenges to better implementation of the project and cite opportunities they felt they could pursue in benefit of the project and the community. Community members from the locations where public forums were conducted cited that it would be of much importance if they had their own social auditors as they also had projects in their localities. Community members were informed that the next phase of the project would seek more social auditors in the locations where public forums had been conducted and other new locations would be identified for public forums.
All community members from the visited counties were also urged to make use of the” Uwajibikaji Pamoja “platform” to lodge complaints they had on the issues they had especially with the elections coming up. Community members urged TI-Kenya to ensure that feedback on resolution of already lodged complaints is given to them to encourage them to use the platform.
Social accountability project has an aim of getting communities involved in the inception and implementation of development projects by sensitizing them on their rights to participate and hold service providers accountable. Social auditors who were picked by their community members to monitor projects on the community’s behalf ensure service providers adhere to sharing information about the project and public participation. Service providers in return benefit from feedback given by social auditors they receive from the social auditors and improve the quality of their services.
