African Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations (African PMOs) Call for Strong Partnerships

African Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations (African PMOs) are recommending strong networking among parliamentary monitoring organizations in Africa to enhance the sharing of information, ideas, experience, knowledge and best practices in order to be effective in their monitoring activities.

This is one of several recommendations by the PMOs in a new baseline report released by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) at the on-going international conference for African Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations (PMOs) being held in Accra.

The two-day conference brought together representatives of civil society organisations from African countries that have been engaging with parliaments on the continent with the objective of enhancing the transparency and performance of African parliaments.

It also aims at strengthening parliamentary openness and accountability by enhancing the capacity of African PMOs to monitor the functioning and the effectiveness of African Parliaments, as well as to promote citizen-parliament engagement on the continent.

The report, among other things, also calls for the training of PMOs in the use of information communication and technology tools to create a virtual democratic space of interaction between PMOs and parliamentarians and other soft skills such as lobbying to forge good working relationships.

The ongoing conference for African Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations forms part of a CDD-Ghana’s project titled “Enhancing Transparency and Openness in African Parliaments: The African Parliamentary Monitoring Organization (PMOs)”, which is receiving funding from the Open Society Foundations (OSF), in particular its West African body, the Open Society Initiative of West Africa (OSIWA). The Accra conference is being organized by CDD-Ghana in partnership with the African Centre for Parliamentary Affairs (ACEPA).

Source: Chris Joe Quaicoe/ email:[email protected]