Our CODE and The Vision to Follow The Money

The year was 2012. The place was Bagega, a remote far-to-reach village in Zamfara, northern Nigeria. A little boy was cradled in his mother’s bony arms. His eyes were glazed like an adult’s, his nose clogged with dirt and phlegm mixed together. He looked sick, very sick. His mother silently prayed as she waited on the queue to the table of the Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF). She hoped that her son survived, hundreds of other children had already died.

Follow The Money (FTM), the flagship campaign of Connected Development (CODE) was conceived after a 14-hour gruelling road trip to Bagega to see first-hand the agony of children and the misery of their mothers, and the helplessness of development workers as they struggled without resources. That was how our work began–witnessing the effects of the lead poisoning epidemic resulting from unregulated artisanal gold-mining.

I realized that neither the media nor the government was talking about the disaster and the people affected. The fate of over 1500 children hanged in the balance. On getting back to the city, I was able to mobilize a few young people begin a digital activism and real-time visualization campaign, spurring government and stakeholders into action.

As Bagega was cleaned and infrastructures installed, we followed up with concise citizen-led intervention projects in similar cases around Nigeria, including Shikira, Niger State. We birthed Connected Development [CODE], an organisation that seeks to empower marginalised communities with access to information. We were constantly frustrated by the fact that people living in rural grassroots communities were not only marginalised but denied access to basic human needs like healthcare, basic education, access to clean water, because funds targeted for the implementation of these resources were hijacked by a few, further widening the inequality gap. We decided to take a stand against this injustice by actively following the money.

Using information technology, Follow The Money gets to the core of what is happening with local, state, national and international budgetary or aid allocations. We advocate, visualize and track government spending and provide information on how and if these funds were effectively utilized  in rural grassroots communities.

Our network of journalists, data wranglers, development consultants, information analysts, legal practitioners, academics and other activists are interested in how open data can make our world transparent and accountable.

Today, seven years down the line, FTM has chapters in Kenya, The Gambia, Cameroon and Liberia. As the largest social mobilization and accountability movement in Africa, it has advocated, visualized and tracked USD 10 million allocated for social development across African grassroots communities, directly impacting over 2,000,000 rural lives.

Africa is transforming, and there is good reason to be optimistic for her future. Robust growth has resulted in increased well-being for many people, as the continent trades with the world and welcomes millions of tourists and investors each year. Yet, moving Africa’s own development agenda forward, as well as translating our strong commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into actions, will require extra approaches, especially from the younger generation.

Increasing the resources available for development is central to improving citizens’ welfare, strengthening public services, and boosting economic competitiveness. However, the obvious challenge is that lack of fiscal discipline and data-based project implementation always sabotage efforts of the international community to help us, as they did with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Hence, our goal to provide a live platform for governments, international agencies, civil society, and the private sector to come together to build partnerships and momentum for achieving shared goals. Last year, we upgraded to www.iFollowTheMoney.org,  an online community for passionate young people who are holding their government accountable in order to increase government service delivery in Africa.

Perhaps, the greatest challenge we faced when we started was access to information; and then the question of in-house competitiveness and inequality, as these are both underlying factors affecting even the government’s ability to deliver sustainable growth and improved economic opportunities for many. For the former, we leveraged on government’s Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, Open Government Partnership that Nigeria signed up to and structured multidimensional partnerships with youth groups and media platforms. For the latter, we consciously enshrined a culture of openness and all-inclusion.

This is also why our need at the moment is to find kindred spirits in individuals and global players who would support our drive to mainstream mentoring and leadership nurturing programmes. We believe that, for there to be seamless transition into the next generation, there needs to be a conscious mentorship agenda on the part of today’s leaders, as well as a willingness on the part of followers to enter a “leadership conveyor belt”. No doubt, Africa needs a leadership evolution that is sustainable and strictly shielded from toxic politics and ethno-religious stereotypes.