Citizen engagement and awareness of the road surface conditions in Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract

In this poster, we present a mobile crowdsourcing application, called Afya Ya Barabara (AYB) (which means road health in Kiswahili). The application serves 2 major roles: First is to collect and visualize data on road surface conditions in Nairobi. Second role is as a citizen engagement platform to raise awareness on the state of road conditions in Nairobi using Twitter hashtags. The focus of this work is to discuss how AYB is employed to promote citizen engagement. Nairobi is one of the most active cities in East Africa in terms of Twitter usage. This guided our decision to employ Twitter as a social engagement tool. The demand for more systematic citizen engagement and public participation in the governance of developing cities is growing. As government budgets are becoming increasingly tight, new ways of addressing road maintenance problems are required. Public governance in developing countries faces accountability issues that allow corruption and poor service delivery to seethe. Lack of information and citizen engagement perpetuates such tendencies. We propose Afya Ya Barabara as an engagement platform that will expand the capacity of municipalities and its citizens to better monitor road conditions using mobile technology.