- Date
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1:50 pm—2:10 pm · June 10, 2025
- Room
- Herten Aas / livestreamed
There is a growing global democratic crisis, whilst civic actors in Africa have decreased access to funding and resources, and suffer significantly from massive digital inequalities. What does it take to build sustainable civic tech capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa and how can past innovations inform scalable support for digital democracy?
This session reflects on OpenUp’s multi-pronged approach to strengthening civil society’s digital readiness across the continent. Drawing from experiences in running an anti-corruption data incubator and a 400+ participant training programme in partnership with the United Nations Foundation, we explore how targeted capacity-building can lay the groundwork for broader democracy-support mechanisms like the Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI).
Through concrete data, user stories, and reflections on implementation challenges and successes, we’ll examine:
- Capacity-building at scale: Lessons from delivering high-impact training and mentoring to civil society actors across Africa.
- From incubation to implementation: How early-stage innovation support, including anti-corruption tech prototypes, enabled local actors to respond to governance challenges in real-time.
- Strengthened technical capacity: Impact metrics demonstrating how the innovation support desk resolved (or didn’t) technical challenges, enabling organisations to deploy tools for citizens.
- Preparing for DDI: What our experience suggests about the conditions needed to scale digital support for pro-democracy actors and what pitfalls to avoid.
The “Empower, Innovate, Connect” framework is examined through real user stories and impact data from OpenUp’s initiatives. Hear specific examples of how supported organisations leveraged technical assistance to enhance democratic participation in their communities, and what this may mean for supporting democracy enhancing technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa.