Browsing by Author "Georgiadoua, Y."

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    Accessing water services in Dar es Salaam: Are we counting what counts?
    (Habitat International, 2014-10) Nganyanyuka, Kapongola; Martnez, Javier; Wesselink, Anna; Lungo, Juma H.; Georgiadoua, Y.
    A significant proportion of urban residents in developing countries has no access to public water supply and relies on unofficial, or even illegal, sources. They buy water from small scale water vendors or collect it from unimproved water sources. This paper draws on qualitative semi-structured interviews with public officials, private water providers and citizens to document details of citizens' strategies for accessing water in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. From these data, we develop a descriptive and evaluative framework to capture the complex mix of sources, uses, and intermediaries in planned and unplanned settings and by affluent and poor citizens. We assess to what extent these strategies solve access problems like quantity, quality, affordability and reliability. We conclude that statistics such as the Millennium Development Goals do not count the access to drinking water that counts for citizens. We discern a bias towards formal state or privatised city-wide systems, discounting the mostly informal, small-scale and unofficial strategies to access water.
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    Citizen Sensors or Extreme Publics? Transparency and Accountability Interventions on the Mobile Geoweb
    (Taylor & Francis Group, 2013-05-08) Georgiadoua, Y.; Lungo, Juma H.; Richter, C.
    Transparency and Accountability (T&A) interventions are emergent social technologies in middle and low-income countries. They bring together citizen sensors, mobile communications, geo-browsers and social organization to raise public awareness on the extent of governance deficits, and monitor government's (in)action. Due to their novelty, almost all we know about the effectiveness of T&A interventions comes from gray literature. Can citizen sensors radically increase the transparency of the state, or are changes brought about by T&A interventions more likely to be incremental? We review the literature on transparency policies and describe their drivers, characteristics and supply–demand dynamics. We discuss promising cases of T&A interventions in East Africa, the empirical focus of an on-going collaborative research program. We conclude that the effect of T&A interventions is more likely to be incremental and mediated by existing organizations and professional users who populate the space between the state and citizens. Two elements at the interface between supply and demand seem rather crucial for designers of T&A interventions: accountability-relevant data and extreme publics.
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    Sensors, Empowerment, and Accountability: a Digital Earth view from East Africa
    (Taylor & Francis Group, 2011-06-21) Georgiadoua, Y.; Bana, Benson; Becht, Robert; Hoppe, Robert; Ikingura, Justinian; Kraak, Menno-Jan; Lance, Kate; Lemmens, Rob; Lungo, Juma H.; McCall, Michael; Miscione, Gianluca; Verplanke, Jeroen
    Several innovative ‘participatory sensing’ initiatives are under way in East Africa. They can be seen as local manifestations of the global notion of Digital Earth. The initiatives aim to amplify the voice of ordinary citizens, improve citizens' capacity to directly influence public service delivery and hold local government accountable. The popularity of these innovations is, among other things, a local reaction to the partial failure of the millennium development goals (MDGs) to deliver accurate statistics on public services in Africa. Empowered citizens, with access to standard mobile phones, can ‘sense’ via text messages and report failures in the delivery of local government services. The public disclosure of these reports on the web and other mass media may pressure local authorities to take remedial action. In this paper, we outline the potential and research challenges of a ‘participatory sensing’ platform, which we call a ‘human sensor web.’ Digital Africa's first priority could be to harness continent-wide and national data as well as local information resources, collected by citizens, in order to monitor, measure and forecast MDGs.