By Ayo Onikoyi

iEngage Hub, a start-up non-governmental organization (NGO) was recently nominated amongst the top twenty start-up NGOs with innovative ideas to receive a seed grant of $20,000 across Nigeria under the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Strengthening Advocacy and Civic Engagement (SCALE) project.

Building on its already profound accomplishment as an innovative civic organization, iEngage, through its iCARE initiative seeks to redefine how citizens are empowered to demand accountability in their jurisdictions. The project will advance iEngage’s vision of building an effective and engaging citizenry by expanding the scope and depth of its intervention focused on empowering citizens for effective engagement through technical support to civic platforms, civic enlightenment, re-orientation, and creation of engagement platforms.

The iCARE approach is built on the assumption that community needs are heterogenous, hence, any attempt to improve citizens’ demand for accountability must be locally driven and must reflect their local priorities, their care points. Through the iCARE approach, select community actors/coalitions will be supported to take actions across several focal areas of their care points upon which they will be scored and ranked. Top ranking communities will be spotlighted Quarterly and celebrated Annually. The ‘spotlight and celebrate’ element of the iCARE approach is designed as a behavioral inducing mechanism to sustain the engagement efforts initiated under the program.

Founded by Adedotun Seyingbo, Abiodun Oladipo and Oluwatosin Oke, iEngage is at the forefront of redefining citizens engagement across Africa, with its interventions aimed at democratizing civic engagement by focusing its innovations on building citizens civic and advocacy capacity one-citizen-at-a-time. Through iEngage’s interventions, there is now increased awareness about state fiscal publications, increased knowledge about what these documents mean and how citizens can constructively engage those publications. iEngage’s fiscal transparency framework was built on the World Bank-supported $1.5 billion Programme for Result (PforR) programme designed to incentivise the timely preparation and publication of states’ financial documents. iEngage framework adopts the publication timelines of SFTAS which are used to send alerts to governance actors and stakeholders. iEngage have also executed several initiatives in the past including convening of campaigns against vote buying, webinars on topical citizens engagement issues, collation and analysis of states fiscal data and the design of a state fiscal transparency indices. These have empowered citizens to understand governance issues and participate consciously in the process.

iEngage’s selection as an awardee under the SCALE project is a confirmation of its strides and prospects as a fast-growing civic organization in Nigeria, whose impact footprint is expected to extend across the African continent in few years time.