The Community, The Change and the Changemakers
Hamzat Lawal
June 12, 2017
Having successfully supervising more than 10 campaigns in more than 10 communities with more than 7 community reporters, I can boastfully say I have moved to become a follow the money evangelist. The passion for seeing the change I wished for keep pushing me and the first – hand knowledge of the local communities in Nigeria as someone who spent a significant part of his life in the village really paves more ways for me to understand what the struggles in the marginalised communities could be like.
As someone who constantly speaks, mentor and train community reporters, I am always trying to see things with their eyes as most times, I get the information as it is hot. Hence, this led me to the majority of my decisions in the organisation.
As an organisation that is almost clocking its 5 years of existence, Connected Development has reached the heart of many marginalised communities in Nigeria, and the love of the community led us to our constant reinvention of our process and workflows.
In Oludotun’s blog titled, “Taming the Monster in Nigeria Budget System“, he made it cleared that; Many developed and developing countries are still working towards linking performance to public expenditures, framework or strategy. If these linkages are not made, there will be no way to determine if the budgetary allocations that the support programs are ultimately supporting are successful.
As such, it can be collectively agreed on that the challenges in the spending of the Nigerian government is not about what to spend but about if the monies allocated is actually been judiciously used or not which is a big question that follow the money seeks to answer.
As written by Olayiwola Victor Ojo in his paper titled, “Ethnic Diversity In Nigeria“, it is presented clearly that the polity Nigeria is one of the most ethnically divided society globally with diverse ethnic cocoons and myriads of dialect. And as such, it may be difficult to Follow the Money in all the local communities in Nigeria and the best approach to solving this diversity problem to empower the communities is to train the locals on how to follow the money, and this has always been the bane of operation of follow the money which makes us have community reporters in almost all states of Nigeria with the goal of reaching all wards in the country.
This is not only a proposition or goal of the organisation, we also share this as a part of the purpose of the organisation which is to empower the marginalised communities in Nigeria through our little effort which made us have a community of follow the money enthusiasts.
In all of these, Mark Zuckerberg in his speech at Havard made it known that membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed and are trying to fill a void. And in our own little way, we are building a community of people who will Follow the Money and become a champion in the Nigeria we aim to see in years to come, this cannot be possible without the sense of belonging to a community who are attached to a purpose of making the government function for the people it is meant to serve.
According to Mark, Change starts locally. Even global changes start small and we hope our little change will have effects the communities to be proactive and ask the government the right question as to demanding for good governance, we hope they will be inspired to know and seek to know what is budgeted for them as a community and they would always request for it and also, we hope to give a voice to that champion who is ready to take a walk and give a voice to his/her community by becoming a champion through leveraging on our platform.
As the community manager of the Follow the Money project, I found a purpose and this will go a long way in my life. It is all about the community, it is about the people and it is way all about leveraging technology to solves challenges facing the communities.
Like the barrister who approached me in the office one day has said “Knowing about this movement made me find what I really want to do”, I hope to see more people who this will truly be their voice, someday.
