The 3rd GYAC Forum in Brasilia, Brazil which was attended by more than 100 youth from 49 countries in the world was an amazing platform for me to supplement the work done back at home against corruption through the ripotirushwa project. The WBI CAP support to ripotirushwa had been a cornerstone to enable our grass root efforts to fight corruption in public health facilities in Dar es Salaam.
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| Frederick speaking at the 3rd GYAC Forum |
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| Lawrence, Dumisani, Frederick & a Brazilian friend |
We have set a very strong infrastructure of ICT to enable
citizen to report corruption as they access public health facilities. The
infrastructure gives us more strength to re-organize ourselves to fight the
increased corruption in Tanzania public health. With a recent issued study by
twaweza it is estimated that one out five residents of Dar es Salaam pay bribe
when they access public health facilities. Yet very few of them report (about
11 percent as per East Africa Bribery Index, 2012) to anti-corruption
authorities in the country where most of them believe that even if they report
nothing will be done to work on their reported corruption incidents.
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| The Global Coordinating Body of GYAC in a panel |
With regard to my participation in the 3rd GYAC
Forum and later the 15th IACC I realized that corruption fighters
all over the world use various strategies to fight corruption and over time
gain successful results. Our project www.ripotirushwa.or.tz
got challenged especially over its strategies that engage grass root citizen to
end corruption. One of the challenges that were obtained from the 3rd
GYAC breakout sessions on African region is that, we need to work on changing
the mind-set of some people in Africa and Tanzania in particular who believe
bribery or corruption is way of life in Africa and nothing could change it.
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| Participants in the 15th IACC |
The 3rd GYAC Forum in Brasilia had opened up another
chapter for www.ripotirushwa.or.tz to adopt new strategies acquired from the
forum to localize the connected efforts and fight corruption with a view of
educating, raising awareness and engage more civilian actors to fight petty
corruption at grass root level in Dar es Salaam and Tanzania in particular.
At the 3rd GYAC Forum I met an anti-corruption
youth expert from Zimbabwe, Dumisani who was inspired with the work done by www.ripotirushwa.or.tz He promised to
take a similar initiative back in Zimbabwe and extend his efforts learning more
from our project to make his more effective. This was one of the success
stories that keep our work awakening to work hard as we are determined to be
inspirational role models for other anti-corruption youth activist across the
world.
The 15th IACC with its more than 1,900
participants from all over the world had created our www.ripotirushwa.or.tz project a wide useful network of similar
actors who uses ICT to curb corruption in the world. A good example is the www.theengineroom.org contact person,
Sussanah Vila and many more others.
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| Frederick & Peter Eigen at the 15th IACC |
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| Lawrence & Frederick at 15th IACC |
Having met the brain behind Transparency International (TI)
Peter Eigen at the 15th IACC had brought not only we who
participated but the whole GYAC Network to other opportunities on enhancing our
knowledge and skills on governance and transparency. All these opportunities
with my view have to be localized in order to bring the change we want to see
at grass root. After the 3rd GYAC Forum and the 15th IACC
we are looking forward to prepare a short
workshop as the follow up activity to share the lesson learnt as we localizing
our connected efforts to end corruption at grass root level in Tanzania.
