‘Civil e-monitoring: a way to community empowerment using modern Internet tools’ is a project implemented in the city of Kairouan in Tunisia by Press Club Foundation and financed by polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of ‘Support for Democracy 2013’ programme. Its primary goal was to create a website based on Fix-my-street formula – an interactive map that allows the users to mark detected in your neighbourhood problems of public space that needed to be fixed – holes in the road, demolished buildings, garbage, etc.
An online tool created in the frame of the project (fixkairouan.org) collects information, which is then forwarded to local authorities allowing them to take actions to improve the situation. FixKairouan is the first initiative of this kind in the Arabic world. Project put emphasis on developing cross-sectoral cooperation between Kairouan’s local NGOs and authorities.
The Development Policy Foundation supported implementing agency – Press Club Foundation (Poland) in developing the project idea, creating the application and provided essential expertise during the project activities. Our organizations representatives, were elected members of the board of Kairouan Community Foundation – the first Tunisian law institution, which brings together representatives of local authorities, local NGO and local entrepreneurships, established to emphasize true community needs, being essentially grass-root and bringing a genuine change, as well as finding answers to social and infrastructural needs reported by fixkairouan.org platform.
Development Policy Foundation, Kairouan Community and Press Club Foundation partnered in the 2015 FixKairouan extension project ‘ELECT Fix Kairouan: in approach of genuine self-government in Tunisia – debating, data gathering & local electoral promises’, in which primary focus being given to ensuring free access to public information and open debates on local government implemented in partnership with the Municipalité de Kairouan, Association de Journalistes de Kairouan (funded under Support for Democracy 2015 programme).