Congratulations to Kenya's Shujaaz.FM on their 2012 Emmy nomination! This is the first time a Kenyan program has been nominated for this prestigious award, which recognizes excellence in media. Shujaaz.FM by Kenya's Well Told Story has been nominated for best 'Digital Program: Children and Young People.' Other nominees in the same category come from Sweden, the UK and Australia.

What is the future of citizenship? That is the question Twaweza Head Rakesh Rajani will debate on February 23 with Arend Jan Boekestijn, a former member of parliament for the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) Party in the Netherlands. Boekestijn currently teaches at the University of Utrecht and has written a book on foreign aid policy. He is skeptical of development aid, believing it results in a passive attitude of citizens from both the donating and receiving countries. Rajani will share insights from a career focused on increasing citizen agency to bring about social change in East Africa.

Tanzania has prepared a draft Country Plan which has been submitted to the OGP Secretariat. (The Kiswahili version will reportedly be posted soon.) Consistent with the principles of open government, Tanzania invites the public and interested parties to submit concrete ideas and inputs to strengthening the Plan. The comments received will be placed online by February 2012 for the public to know. Thank you for your inputs. We will use them to help strengthen the Tanzania Open Government Plan. Open here to see the format of submitting your comments.

Mobile phone technology offers an exciting potential to collect data at reduced cost, and in a way that is more frequent and more responsive to the changing data needs for monitoring service delivery and accountability. Based on this idea, Uwazi at Twaweza seeks to implement the Wananchi Survey: a high frequency household survey using mobile phones in a nationally representative sample covering 1500 households in Tanzania. The data collected in this way will inform public debate about a wide range of public policies in Tanzania.

Therefore, Twaweza is looking for competent and reputable organizations who can implement the two activities that this work entails: a) establishing, enlisting, training and surveying a sample of 1500 households that will participate in the mobile phone survey and b) developing and operating a call center for the monthly mobile phone surveys. The project will be implemented for an initial period of one year, and if successful, it will be repeated every year for an indefinite period of time. In subsequent years the frequency of the survey may be increased from monthly to twice monthly. The Wananchi Survey is also expected to be expanded into Kenya and Uganda.

Twaweza is expanding. Feel free to browse around on our website: Do you like what we stand for and what we do? Do you have a curiosity and passion to learn? Do you like to push the envelope, take thoughtful risks, innovate, get things done? Would you like to make change happen in East Africa? We may be a match! Look at our Jobs section.

On 18 November 2011 nearly 100 civil society groups from as many countries and 12 international organizations, including the International Budget Partnership, Greenpeace, and the ONE Campaign, launched a global effort to make public budgets transparent, participatory, and accountable. The effort centers on building an integrated and vibrant movement of organizations that will work at the local, national, and international level to promote government budgeting that is open and accountable to the public. The organizations meeting in Dar es Salaam to launch the global Civil Society Movement for Budget Transparency, Accountability, and Participation laid the foundation of the movement by signing a Declaration of Principles.

ShujaazFM, Kenya's interactive multimedia project and Twaweza partner is now available on YouTube. The ShujaazFM YouTube channel adds a cool new strand to its collection of social media platforms which previously included Facebook and Twitter. ShujaazFM comics are reportedly the largest print publication in Kenya, with over 600,000 copies of its books distributed every month. Its pirate comic radio show is broadcasted on 20 local radios and has thousands of fans interacting through Facebook and Twitter.