CITIZENS are the core of our nations. Governments exist to serve citizens and are ultimately accountable to them.
Sadly, citizens' voices are often missing from some policy debates.
As a result, big decisions about policies, laws, programmes and budgets take little account of their lived experiences, priorities and opinions.
For the decade since 2013, Twaweza (an independent East African initiative that was established in 2009) has been working to fill this gap. In the course, it developed a new approach to systematically listen to citizens across Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.
It's not rocket science: we randomly select a nationally-representative panel of at least 2,000 citizens (or 7,500 recently in Tanzania), conduct a traditional household survey to get things started and then call panel members by phone whenever we need to collect their views on a wide variety of themes.
We call this Sauti za Wananchi - Voices of the People. We've just passed the tenth anniversary of these surveys, a period during which we conducted over 74,000 hours of interviews.
Across topics ranging from taxation to policing to water supply to the media to governance and politics, we have listened to what citizens are saying.
We shared that information with policy makers and amplified the insights in the media. And we have built up a huge wealth of data on citizens' experiences and opinions, which is all publicly available.
In the coming days, we will publish a Sauti za Wananchi @ 10 compendium and launch a website that showcases key insights of the thousands of conversations we have held with ordinary citizens in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Here is a taste of what we have found.
Firstly, regarding livelihoods, we have identified widespread concern among citizens across the countries about the high cost of living.
Whenever we have conducted surveys, this issue consistently ranks among the top challenges facing both their countries and their families.
In fact, over the past three years, it has climbed even higher, emerging as the primary concern in the latest surveys across all three countries, with unemployment not far behind.
Citizens' worries about hunger has also been high, particularly (though not exclusively) during 2017-18. Although our farmers are producing more than ever and our food reserves are well-stocked, a significant number of our citizens regularly go hungry.
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Indeed, when asked directly, typically around one-third of citizens report having been forced to go a whole day without food at least once in the past few months.
In light of the concerns about the cost of living and unemployment, the issue of food insecurity at the family level is less about food availability and more about its affordability.
The extent to which large numbers of households continue to face income- and affordability-driven food insecurity is worrying.
Is this hidden hunger a permanent condition in the three countries? Is the climate crisis complicating agriculture and stifling the progress we might otherwise achieve? Can we devise a way to produce and distribute food so that hunger becomes a thing of the past?
Secondly, across all three countries, citizens are more optimistic about the future than the present -- both for their own living conditions and for their countries.
In Kenya, for example, in 2022, only seven percent of citizens believed the country was in good economic shape at that time, but two-thirds felt the country would be better off twelve months later.
This optimism about the future represents a potential pool of patience. Citizens who believe the future looks bright will be more inclined to endure hardship in the present.
However, the pool is not infinite.
Optimism will evaporate if citizens' economic hardships persist and governments appear unable to lower the cost of living and rates of unemployment.
Perhaps the GenZ protests in Kenya indicate that cracks are beginning to appear and widen.
Third, the survey data reveal some tantalising cultural differences between the three countries.
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For example, while a large majority of citizens of all three countries are "very proud" of their citizenship, just a quarter of Kenyans identify themselves primarily as Kenyan, which is half as many as the Ugandans and Tanzanians who see themselves citizens of their countries first.
There is also a significant difference in the culture of citizen participation. Three quarters of Tanzanians report having attended a community meeting the previous year, compared to around half of Kenyans and just 40% of Ugandans.
What does this say about how powerful we feel to shape our lives?
There is so much more to discover from what citizens have been saying in the past 10 years of conversation. It will be worth your while to read the report, explore the website and join in the regional conversation of Sauti za Wananchi.
The writer is the Executive Director of Twaweza East Africa, a regional organisation promoting active citizenship and responsive governance.
