Jessica (Executive Director of Mzalendo Trust) presented a keynote session at The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC 2015) on 25 March 2015 in London.

1. Learnings from the MIT &
Mzalendo Research
Jessica Musila
Executive Director, Mzalendo Trust, info.mzalendo.com
The Impact of Civic Tech Conference
convened by mySociety, 25th March 2015 in London, UK

2. The Opportunity
Leah’s research proposal was opportune for us in many ways:
• Explored possibilities of public participation in governance through
issue framing;
• Met our need to grow our Facebook audience;
• Opened our eyes to an opportunity to connect with two key
constituencies – the Parliament Secretariat Commission and
Parliamentarians;
• Met a felt need by indirectly providing a ‘free’ advertising budget for
us to capitalize on for publicity;
• Provided research expertise to inform our work at minimal expense to
us.

3. Practical Challenges
• Researcher’s low understanding of the context – Assumptions corrected;
• Contextual reading and sharing;
• Identifying a political issue with public interest but relatively low political
risk to Mzalendo team;
• Ever changing Parliamentary agenda – made it hard to efficiently plan
around another issue;
• Tech team far removed from context is not always responsive to Mzalendo
needs as they arise. {Campaigns are crucial to PMOs lives in democracies in
transition unlike established ones like the UK and US.}
• Delay in sharing research findings rendered them time barred & therefore
not useful to share with the Leader of Majority in the Senate as proposed;
• Oversight – we did not post a blog about the research: This would have
been useful content to tell opinion leaders what citizens are thinking;

4. The Findings
• Older men take action versus the young – was not strange as it validates
other civic research that older men tend to be more vocal on politics than
youth and women;
• The County Development Fund issue was far removed from the youth as
older men still control the means of power and wealth in Kenya;
• The Band-wagonning frame is more likely to gain traction in political
contexts like ours where people tend to be drawn to the collective and
ethnic vote rather than the individual;
• That Kenyans wanted more resources allocated to development work in
their county was not in doubt.
• Information/issue was too far removed from people, it needed to “sting“ at
the personal level to push them take responsibility; Financial figures were
far removed from the individual level of understanding (day to day life) so
level of interest was generally be lower

5. Unintended Benefits
• The adverts had an audience reach of over 1,000,000 Kenyans which
was great for Mzalendo’s visibility;
• Mzalendo gained about 12000 new followers who have remained
with us to date and are interested in political issues;
• The research findings have informed Mzalendo’s strategic direction in
terms of:
i) Distilling the value proposition we can offer Parliamentarians and
the Parliamentary Secretariat Commission in public participation;
ii) Issues framing possibilities to attract public attention;
iii) Gauging user interest and identifying touch points we could
capitalise to reach them e.g. Religion, family members and friends

6. Questions?