Campaign for transparency and accountability
Transparency and accountability are major ingredients when dealing with public natural resources like extractives industry. Oil and gas industry demands steady fast stewardship from the government and awakened and informed citizens if they are to gain meaningful results from the sector. We have participated in processes for facilitating admission of Uganda government into Extractives industries transparency initiative (EITI) this a global standard for the good governance of oil, gas and other mineral resources.
Transparency is key to ensuring that potential revenues from oil and gas production are not mismanaged or lost to corruption. EITI implementation will require Uganda to publicly disclose information such as contracts, beneficial owners, revenues and payments, including payments related to the environment. These disclosures can in turn promote public oversight and debate.
Our objective is to have citizens demand for service delivery against the public resources (taxes) and how these resources can benefit the current and future generation.
And as CICOA we can proudly say we participated in processes that materialized this achievement.
CICOA championed the promotion of accountability by government by sensitizing the refinery-affected people and supported them to engage parliament to hold Ministry of Energy accountable over corruption and abuse of the refinery-affected people’s rights.
Access to information is critical if transparency and accountability are to be achieved, and as organization working with communities, this was has and remains our core role to share information with citizens so that citizens are empowered to demand for accountability from government and other service providers.
With CICOA’s campaign on save Lwera swamp in Kalungu district Greater Masaka, the relevant authorities like NEMA and the ministry of Agriculture and the president on his visit in Masaka, promised to deal with wetland degraders and ordered the environment ministry and NEMA to stop further degradation of the wetlands. General public was sensitized on the importance of wetlands and dangers of degradation, and were trained on being custodians for the environment protection in their areas.
