Past partnerships: Intensive Support
Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales
Argentine human rights organisation Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS), has worked since 1979 to create a more just, fair, and accountable country, using strategic litigation, research and advocacy. Over the past 20 years, CELS has been manually documenting cases of “institutional violence” (violence perpetrated by police and armed forces) in greater Buenos Aires and has created a database of almost 5,000 cases. Today, it’s the only database of its kind in Argentina.
During their Matchbox partnership, CELS will focus on updating, systematising, collecting, analysing and securely sharing information from this database to the public. All of this data and tech support will ultimately allow them to further their advocacy and create a conversation about police violence in Argentina.
reAcción
This young and innovative Paraguayan organisation is holding their government to account in the education sector, monitoring the national education investment fund, FONACIDE, to ensure that the fund benefits students. Historically, this public education fund has been considered to be highly corrupt, and the reAccion team, along with dozens of student volunteers are working to increase its visibility and monitor its use.
In order to expand their reach without losing rigour, they will work with The Engine Room to improve their data collection and visualisation methods and to create training tools for citizen monitors.
Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y Justicia
Argentinian civil society organization Asociacion Civil por la Igualdad y Justicia (ACIJ), has worked in access to information, transparency and accountability of government, manually collecting and analysing budget data for many years.
As part of the Matchbox partnership, ACIJ is working to improve the way they’re collecting this data to better analyse actual government spending. Together with The Engine Room, ACIJ will improve the quality and accessibility of their Budget Monitor platform, making it increasingly useful for civil society organizations, activists and journalists in Argentina.
Legal Advisory Information Center
South African organisation Legal Advisory Information Center (LAIC) aims to make land tenure rights more inclusive, just and equitable through their legal empowerment work. They conduct policy research, carry out legal education work and advocate for changes in property rights in an effort to fight against weak policies, misappropriation of government resources and relics of apartheid.
With The Engine Room, LAIC is exploring ways in which data and technology can give access to justice to unserved communities in South African. Together we will explore ways to make their work more efficient, safe and organized, developing an internal data policy and investigating technology-driven solutions for case management and legal empowerment.
Kenya Civil Society Platform for Oil and Gas
The Kenya Civil Society Platform for Oil and Gas (KCSPOG) advocates for transparency and accountability in Kenya’s oil and gas sector. They conduct research, build coalitions and lead campaigns. Their work is especially important since Kenya’s oil and gas sector is in its formative years but has suffered from opaque transactions and possible corruption.
As a Matchbox partner, KCSPOG will develop a system that aggregates otherwise siloed datasets on oil and gas contracts and makes them more accessible – in a responsible manner – to its coalition members.
Private Public Development Center
For over ten years, Private Public Development Center (PPDC) have developed and deployed open contracting tools in Nigeria to improve procurement governance. They are forerunners in the work towards more accountable and transparent fiscal governance in Nigeria. Now, they are keen to do even more to increase citizen involvement and state-level compliance, since both have slowed the growth of access to information in Nigeria.
With The Engine Room, PPDC will grow the usefulness and uptake of their open data portals, starting by collecting and analysing information on how users are interacting with existing portals.
Causa Natura
This Mexican advocacy organization worked on a project to improve the management of natural resources, specifically fisheries, while increasing transparency in the sector. Their project Pescando Datos seeks to combat corruption in Mexican fisheries by visualising the allocation of subsidies and empowering fishermen and women to succeed in the system. We supported Causa Natura on opening, visualising and analysing data about how subsidies are allocated and how fishing rights are currently granted.
Japiqay
This brand new Peruvian organisation launched a platform Memoria y Ciudadanía that tells the story of systematic corruption in Peru over the past 30 years – and seeks to prevent further cases – through data analysis, visualizations, storytelling and advocacy. The Engine Room supported Japiqay in building this searchable database, connecting them with strategic partners and strengthening their nascent organisation.
Anti-Corruption Coalition
The Anti-Corruption Coalition (ACCU) of Uganda uses messaging apps to allow citizens to report transparency and accountability violations and wanted to develop a safe channel where public officials could access these complaints and act upon them. The Engine Room supported ACCU with background research on existing solutions, platform customisation and data management. The core goal was to support ACCU in developing strong and feasible strategies integrating civic technology in their advocacy.
SEEDi
SEEDi applied for our support in order to shed more light on the reality of budget allocations in Nigeria, with a special focus on funds for job creation and the financing of small businesses. They came having already collected a lot of information from government agencies. The Engine Room supported SEEDi with data visualisation, storytelling and data analysis to bring financing information to smallholder farmers.
Code for Sierra Leone
Code for Sierra Leone is a civic tech organisation that uses open source technologies to spur innovation in the public sector. The group held their first ever data bootcamp in June 2016, and during the event they started developing various different tools — out of which grew the beta version of MWash, a mobile application to map public water points in the country and to track contaminated water sites. Through the Matchbox partnership, we worked with Code for Sierra Leone to improve the MWash platform’s role in addressing access to potable water challenges in Sierra Leone.
Institute for Public Policy Research
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) is a Namibian organisation with a mission to deliver independent, analytical, and critical research into social, political and economic issues that affect development in the country. We have been supporting IPPR to improve their data analysis and investigative skills through developing a data model and a platform that turns petroleum exploration data into usable information, and through facilitating connections between IPPR and experts.
Quien Compro
The ¿Quién Compró? project started with individual freedom of information requests by Mexican investigative journalists for the receipts of congressmen and women. We have been supporting the group to take a closer look at how members of congress were spending public funds, through liberating, digitising and visualising the receipts of Mexican parliamentarians’ expenditures. We provided recommendations on data structure, data entry and the digitization of receipts.
Data Centar
Through the Data Centar project we’re providing support for the Serbian transparency organisation CRTA to build new ways of making government data available to the public. We helped conduct interviews and workshops to make sure we’re building what people are asking for, re-imagined and tested the entire pipeline for opening data, and developed a human-centered solution through iteration, design and development.
Directorio Legislativo
An Argentine organisation that promotes dialogue, transparency and access to public information within the legislative branches of government. Directorio Legislativo was looking for developing a tool that would track changes made to bills discussed in Parliament, so that people can understand what Congress was doing without having to search through piles of documents. Our team supported the project to develop the necessary needs assessment, create a wireframe for the web platform, and help with fundraising.
Kubatana
Kubatana is a civic and human rights advocacy organization based in Zimbabwe with a long history of using mobile communications for outreach. They asked for our help to crowdsource data collection on water availability to oversee the implementation of water rehabilitation infrastructure projects throughout the city of Harare. We worked with Kubatana to find a way to easily process their Whatsapp conversations and helped them convert the information received into usable formats.
Ndifuna Ukwazi
Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU) is a team of advocates based in Cape Town who use research and strategic litigation to campaign for justice and equality in poor and working class communities. NU sought Matchbox help to improve public service delivery and increase access to information about how local governments procure public services in South Africa. Our team worked with NU to finalize a data model for managing the contract data and developed a database to allow for investigation and analysis.