Community data literacy for demand driven change

The need for this pilot stemmed from the realisation that calls by CSOs and CBOs for improved transparency and accountability in the management of mineral wealth tends to generally overshadow the use of available data to demand accountability. There was also the realisation that publicly available data from local sources, such as local government budgets and financial statements, has so far not been used to its full extent to empower citizen participation in local public financial management systems. The data from the EU, UK and Canada mandatory disclosure of payments made to governments by Multinational Corporations (MNCs) in the extractives also needs to be used more thoroughly.

The communities involved were equipped with skills to assess local mining tax revenue so that they could use data to ask for LESD finance to come from mineral wealth extraction. The data that was used included local government budget statements, financial statements and mandatory disclosure of payments made to the government by AngloAmerican’s Unki Mine project in Zimbabwe.

This case study by Mukasiri Sibanda of PWYP Zimbabwe is part of Publish What You Pay’s Data Extractors programme, a global initiative which trains PWYP members and activists from across our network to use extractives data.