Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan

The Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan builds on the experiences, lessons learned, tools, and applications developed during the implementation of the project "Strengthening Parliaments’ Information Systems in Africa." The objective of the Action Plan is to empower African Parliaments with skills, services and applications that will allow them to become open, participatory, knowledge-based learning organisations and support inter-parliamentary collaboration. The plan was designed in collaboration with the Pan Africa Parliament (PAP) and national parliaments and endorsed by the PAP in 2005.

Several activities intend to contribute to the implementation of the Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan by focusing on:

• building managerial and technical skills in parliaments;
• developing information and e-services tailored to the needs of African Parliaments to effectively meet the ever changing information needs of parliaments;
• deploying, developing, and supporting applications based on open source and open standards to sustainably address the information management and dissemination requirements of parliaments;
• supporting the development of a legal and regulatory framework for achieving an equitable and open Information Society; and
• improving parliamentary development assistance co-ordination and integration in Africa in order to maximise the use of human and financial resources available.

The project focuses on the following regional initiatives:

• Bungeni Parliamentary and Legislative Information System: a suite of open source applications meant to improve the efficiency and efficacy of Parliamentary processes and systems and reduce the cost and time of information dissemination by allowing efficient creation, management, and publishing of parliamentary documents in different formats and on different media.
• Akoma Ntoso: a set of simple, technology-neutral XML machine-readable descriptions of parliamentary, legislative, and judiciary documents that makes the structural and semantic components of digital parliamentary documents accessible, supporting the creation of high-value parliamentary and legislative information services that greatly improve efficiency and accountability in the parliamentary institutions.
• Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network (APKN): a parliamentary network meant to support capacity building activities, common services, sharing of experiences and best practices among African parliaments. It was established in June 2008 under the aegis of the Pan African Parliament. In October 2010, the 1st APKN Council of Coordinators and Plenary was convened and elected the new Executive Committee chaired by the Parliament of South Africa.

Democracy and Governance.

According to the Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan, the acquisition and management of information is the most critical expertise that African Parliaments need to develop. Increasing the effectiveness of information acquisition, elaboration, and dissemination, is the best way for a Parliament to significantly increase its capacity to make informed decisions in a transparent and anticipatory way. The wider accessibility of Parliamentary activities, together with the greatly enhanced capacity of parliamentary staff and quality of Parliamentary Information Services, will significantly strengthen the pivotal role of African Parliaments as institutions that enforce good governance, promote democratic accountability, and create political legitimacy through the active and informed participation of civil society organisations and citizens.