Resources
podcasts
Challenges to achieving Access to Information - an African perspective
At a recent workshop hosted by ODAC in Cape Town, a number of Access to Information activists and experts were interviewed. They spoke on the challenges to achieving access to information, and some possible solutions to those challenges, focussing on the themes of legal issues, political issues and political will and technical/infrastructural. Click on each of the interviews to listen to them.
Gilbert Sendugwa, Africa Freedom of Information Centre, Uganda
Sampa Kanga-Wilkie Specialist: Freedom of Expression & Media Law, Media Institute of Southern Africa
Overview of the state of Access to Information in Africa
Interview with Mukelani Dimba, Open Democracy Advice Centre, South Africa
Private Sector
Richard discusses the right of access to information held by the private sector, and how this can be secured not only through legislation but also through voluntary initiatives.
"Transparency is not a golden bullet. What it does at its best is it changes the rules of the game; it makes unequal partners less unequal, and it creates a little bit of political space so that people can then argue for their interests and their rights."
Interview with Richard Calland, co-director, IST
Record Making and Record Keeping
Colin Darch discusses how record-keeping and the nature of a bureaucracy are important factors in securing access to information.
"There is a narrative which people want to be told, and there are other narratives which they want to silence. One of the purposes of access to information is to invite those other narratives to be told, the stories that in many cases the bureaucrats and the political class absolutely don't want to be told. Record-keeping isn't a dry, dusty, dead subject, it's the site of the struggle."
interview with Colin Darch