Citizens are the core of our nations. Governments exist to serve citizens, and are ultimately accountable to them. Sadly, citizens’ voices are often missing from policy debates. As a result, big decisions about policies, laws, programmes and budgets take little account of their lived experiences, priorities and opinions.
For the decade since 2013, Twaweza has been working to fill this gap. We developed a new approach to listen to citizens across Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda systematically.
It’s not rocket science: We randomly select a nationally representative panel of at least 2,000 citizens (or 7,500 recently in Tanzania), conduct a traditional household survey to get things started, and then call panel members by phone whenever we need to collect their views on a wide variety of themes. We call this Sauti za Wananchi—Voices of the People.
We’ve just passed the tenth anniversary of these surveys, a period during which we conducted over 74,000 hours of interviews. Across topics ranging from taxation to policing to water supply to the media to governance and politics, we have listened to what citizens are saying.
We shared that information with policymakers and amplified the insights in the media. We have also built up a huge wealth of publicly available data on citizens’ experiences and opinions.
READ: Twaweza Battles Misinformation As Its Sauti za Wananchi Findings Reach the Masses
In the coming days, we will publish a Sauti za Wananchi @ 10 compendium and launch a website that showcases key insights from the thousands of conversations we have held with ordinary citizens in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. You can register your participation here. The following is a taste of what we have found.
High cost of living
Firstly, regarding livelihoods, we have identified widespread concern among citizens across the countries about the high cost of living.
Whenever we have conducted surveys, this issue consistently ranks among the top challenges facing their countries and families. In fact, over the past three years, it has climbed even higher, emerging as the primary concern in the latest surveys across all three countries, with unemployment not far behind.
Citizens’ worries about hunger have also been high, particularly –though not exclusively– during 2017-18. Although our farmers are producing more than ever, and our food reserves are well-stocked, many citizens regularly go hungry.
Indeed, when asked directly, typically around one-third of citizens report having been forced to go a whole day without food at least once in the past few months. In light of the concerns about the cost of living and unemployment, the issue of food insecurity at the family level is less about food availability and more about its affordability.
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The extent to which large numbers of households continue to face income- and affordability-driven food insecurity is worrying. Is this hidden hunger a permanent condition in the three countries?
Is the climate crisis complicating agriculture and stifling the progress we might otherwise achieve? Can we devise a way to produce and distribute food so that hunger becomes a thing of the past?
Optimism
Secondly, citizens in all three countries are more optimistic about the future than the present—both for their own living conditions and for their countries.
In Kenya, for example, in 2022, only seven per cent of citizens believed the country was in good economic shape, but two-thirds felt the country would be better off twelve months later.
This optimism about the future represents a potential pool of patience. Citizens who believe the future looks bright will be more inclined to endure hardship in the present. However, the pool is not infinite.
READ: Tanzanians Debate Nation’s Future As Union Clocks Sixty Years
Optimism will evaporate if citizens’ economic hardships persist and governments appear unable to lower the cost of living and unemployment rates. Perhaps the Gen Z protests in Kenya indicate that cracks are beginning to appear and widen.
Third, the survey data reveal some tantalising cultural differences between the three countries. For example, while most citizens of all three countries are “very proud” of their citizenship, just a quarter of Kenyans identify themselves primarily as Kenyan, half as many as the Ugandans and Tanzanians who see themselves as citizens of their countries first.
There is also a significant difference in the culture of citizen participation. Three-quarters of Tanzanians reported attending a community meeting the previous year, compared to around half of Kenyans and just 40 per cent of Ugandans. What does this say about how powerful we feel to shape our lives?
There is so much more to discover from what citizens have been saying in the past ten years of conversation. Reading the report, exploring the website, and joining the regional conversation with Sauti za Wananchi will be worthwhile.
Aidan Eyakuze is the Executive Director of Twaweza East Africa, a regional organisation that promotes active citizenship and responsive governance. He can be reached at aeyakuze@twaweza.org or on X as @aeyakuze. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
