By Gift Olivia Samuel, The Sight News
ABUJA: To mark a decade of working to empower marginalized communities, impacting over four million lives and building accountability and transparency at all levels of governance across Africa, Connected Development (CODE) and social accountability movement, FollowTheMoney (FTM) on Wednesday unveiled new logos.
The unveiling of the new logos and a presentation showcasing a brief journey of CODE/FTM achievements was held in Abuja, where success stories, highlights as well as description of the logos were also disclosed.
Giving a brief description of CODE, the Director of Programs, Mrs. Lucy James Abagi, said CODE which was birthed in 2012, presently has its social accountability movement FollowTheMoney in 10 African countries, and is working to empower young people, women and girls to hold their government accountable, by ensuring that everyone, everywhere have the right information, data and evidences they need to ensure change, transparency and accountability in their own local communities.
She further explained that although they have success stories, CODE also has challenges, especially that of access to information and funding, and called on state governments to make information on their budget accessible.
According to her, “Access to Information is a problem for us at CODE because our work is driven by data and evidence and we do verification and validation before we come out with any information, to ensure that we give the public the right data. Access to Information is a problem because governments in some states at some level have refused to ensure that the information that citizens need to hold them accountable are in public space.
“So, if we want this work to keep moving forward, the government needs to open up more by ensuring their budget, implementation plans, monetary allocations to budget are in the open space so that citizens and CSOs like CODE can use that information to hold them to account.
“Also, funding has been a big challenge for us at CODE. We are very innovative and creative but sustainable funding is necessary because the work we do is linked to how much money we have to go how far we want to go”, she said.
Speaking on the plan for CODE and FollowTheMoney in the next 10 years, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) Ijeoma Oforka, said they have a new 10 years Strategic Plan and activities embedded in, that speak to youth empowerment and engagement in elections, tracking and accountability.
She also noted that CODE has been able to galvanize about 10 products spreading across 10 African countries including Nigeria, ensuring that they make meaningful impact in advocacy and campaign everywhere they go, adding that CODE has tracked over N2 billion.
“We’ve gone through a lot of challenges, we’ve been able to overcome them and we’ve been able to actually access funds to ensure that more lives are being touched. We are proud of what we have achieved and we will not stop there”, she said.
Also speaking on the Strategic Plans and FTM impacts, Busayo Morakinyo, CODE’s Community Engagement Director, said CODE is working to see how communities and individuals can do the work FTM does, stating that until citizens are able to take full control of the process, then they are still scratching the surface.
“For us, 10 years is a milestone that we want to celebrate and we are deliberate about that. We want to celebrate communities that have partnered with us and donors but much more than that, we are celebrating the resilience of citizens who have decided to learn using the FTM methodology to hold their government to account”, he said.
Speaking briefly on what the new logos entail, the Communications Manager, Stephen Akinfela, said the new CODE logo is red which is the organisation’s theme colour and has puzzles which explains what CODE stands for which are —Transparency, Freedom of Information, Open Government and Accountability, noting that CODE going forward will engage in campaigns, grassroots mobilization, advocacy and innovation.
For the FollowTheMoney logo, he said the 10th anniversary logo is an offshoot of the main logo and they are sticking to it with the hopes that they will reach out to more communities, influence more lives, encourage citizens to track government spendings from the grassroots, and ensure openness and transparency.
