The Hoima City project planning/kick-off workshop for June 15 – 16 2022 was completed successfully. We were able to loop in some city administrators at political and technical levels who gave us insights on what might be the opportunities and challenges ahead as we embark on our baseline study on urban governance in Uganda;
1. We were able to understand, for example, that in Hoima City, many technical positions were not yet filled by the government/public service commission. This could have implications for our study, especially understanding capacity availability for establishing urban data governance guidelines in the short term.
2. Besides, the concept of Data Governance (DG) seems completely new at that sub-national level in the city! The city authority members that we preliminarily engaged in Hoima intimated to us that we needed to be prepared to do a lot of work to convince their colleagues to understand the DG concept.
3. The Deputy Resident City Commissioner (D/RCC) and Community Development Officer (CDO) emphatically pledged to work with our team; introduce us to every research respondent we would be interested in within the city. This sounded as a plus to our future study project plan/activities. We now have a clear linkage between the technical and political city stakeholders in Hoima.
4. We were able to interact and learn more about Hoima City’s unique context and a feel of how key project stakeholders may respond to our data governance project. The city residents seemed more active and upbeat about its elevation to such urban status than Fort Portal city, due to anticipation of starting oil extraction in 2023. Hoima city’s physical planning, transport and infrastructural development is growing at a very high speed, presenting opportunities for increased need for data/evidence and DG mechanisms.
That aside, we are progressing steadily with our scheduled activities: This week, July 7, we have a 2 hours’ project initiation breakaway session in Kampala city at the DataFest Africa 2022 Conference, which is hosted by POLLICY. We have invited all our potential stakeholders at national level to attend and give feedback to our proposal for the baseline study. Later on July 20, 2022 we will hold another project kick-off session at the East African regional DataFest Africa 2022 event in Dar es salaam, Tanzania in order to loop in the regional stakeholders.