Accountability is the obligation for any manager of public property and any representative of third parties to account for the business he conducts on their behalf.

It is a good governance practice that builds trust between leaders, and more generally public officials and their base.

Thus, all authorities at all levels and all positions, whether elective or nominative, must respect this principle. Accountability requires reciprocal responsibility between rulers and ruled. Indeed, for it to be effective, everyone will have to assume their duties and exercise their rights. The right to be kept informed or to claim the use of the taxes collected comes with the duty to pay them. The rights to denounce insalubrity comes with the duty to act in a salubrious manner.

Accountability therefore requires reciprocity and proactive and reactive actions.

The Internet and more generally digital tools open the way to new possibilities to more easily exercise the practice of accountability. Indeed, public and private initiatives demonstrate this fact.

In commune V of the district of Bamako, the Town Hall uses the Mobile MonElu application to interact with the population. Indeed, this application developed by Tuwindi allows the town hall to report regularly on its activities, to answer questions and interpellations of the inhabitants and even to organize debates on a regular basis.

Each month, the Mayor sends a message to all the users of his municipality to tell them about the affairs of the municipality. The message is accessible in written text in French, in audio in the Bambara and Songhoi languages.

Every two weeks, one of his Deputies takes part in a question-and-answer exercise with the citizens on a chosen subject. This can be on the TDRL, land, employment etc.

Spontaneously, citizens also ask questions that are instantly answered by the town hall.

In less than four months, the town hall was able to mobilize via this application more than 2000 people whose average age is 24 years and little by little increases the involvement of inhabitants in the management of public affairs in the municipality by the means digital.

Within the framework of the WAEMU community directives on budgetary transparency, the ministry in charge of finance in Mali publishes on its website https://www.finances.gouv.ml/ , all information related to public procurement , the complete and simplified state budget and contracts.

The Malian government, through its Facebook and Twitter accounts, regularly informs about the activities of the President and the Ministers almost in real time.

During the 2018 presidential election, following pressure from international and national observation missions, the Ministry of Territorial Administration published the election results polling station by polling station on its website. This allowed the organizations involved in election monitoring to detect multiple inconsistencies and at the same time.

It emerges from these cases that the power of strengthening transparency and the opening of ICTs to the greatest number of people makes it an accessible means of making accountability a reality at all levels.

At Tuwindi, MonElu’s perspective is to move towards mutual accountability within the framework of the co-construction of the city. In this case, citizens and rulers decide together and everyone plays their part in a transparent way. For example, the state of payment of citizens’ taxes is made public as well as their uses by the leaders or the participation of the population in the choice of projects, as well as their access to information on their execution.

This dematerialization will lead to responsible co-management, which will mitigate corruption, build trust and promote inclusive and sustainable development.

Obviously, if ICTs open up almost incalculable avenues, we must note several major challenges that do not allow them to express their full potential.

From a political point of view, the authorities who, until then, controlled the media space are losing their monopoly thanks to social networks, which are generating new actors who are more influential on their own than the state media. They hold authorities to account under pressure. Being taken aback by the changes caused by the Internet, they often do not play the game of transparency as desired and highlight the threats that social networks and more generally the Internet can present by eclipsing all the opportunities that they offer including the fact that they themselves use them for their propaganda.

The results of the polling stations released by the government under duress were in « PDF » format and the extraction and processing of data requires technical skills that are often not within the reach of civil society organizations let alone ordinary citizens. . The government could simply have distributed the file readable by a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.

This lack of will is a challenge and sometimes leads to the adoption of laws that often restrict freedoms, thereby creating mistrust among users.

The legislation applicable to digital must be co-constructed with users, who are willing to carry out this exercise with the State. This lack of co-creation of the rules violates the basic principle of mutual accountability in the digital age and the product created is often a crude approximation quickly discarded.

The law on cybercrime presents a beautiful spirit, but due to the low involvement of digital players in its development process, it has also become a text of restriction and threat to freedoms.

From an economic point of view, digital participation solutions are often financed within the framework of subsidized projects. This model by its nature comes with requirements that can potentially compromise the viability of the project at the end of the grant.

Access fees are still beyond the reach of the population, as are the equipment that can offer optimal comfort of use. However, facilitating people’s access to digital services is an essential factor in propelling the digital economy and increasing citizen participation through digital technology. Indeed, one can quite imagine free access to all public platforms hosted in Mali. Only the services of these platforms would be chargeable, the operators and providers of its digital services will then be able to find a reasonable and favorable agreement for users under the watchful and benevolent eye of the competent State regulator.

The role of the private sector, particularly that of telecommunications service operators, is important in the fight for digital accountability. They must be accountable to the people and also act so that they can get the most out of them. As such, it is important to build partnerships between telecommunications service operators, providers of participation solutions and more generally “Civic-Tech” and the State.

On a technical level, participation solutions are often developed for the population by concealing their participation at all stages of their construction. Which makes them impressive concentrates of technologies that can only be used by a very low privilege. The spirit of accountability can be applied at this level as well. As a candidate listens to citizens to develop his program, technology providers must listen to citizens to define the specifications and come back to them with a solution for validation.

The first version of MonElu in 2017 did not sufficiently respect this principle, the handling of the solution as well as certain user protection challenges forced the developers of Tuwindi to review all the specifications as well as their strategy. This is why the current version – November 2020 – has been entirely developed in close collaboration with the populations, elected officials, State executives, civil society organizations and academics. It includes voice assistance in national languages, advanced user data protection features, its ergonomics have been redesigned and validated by and for users, support for asynchronous communications has been incorporated as well as text communication capabilities in the event of complete internet unavailability. The resumption of the development process was a fruitful investment because it made it possible to be in line with the capacities and needs of the users of the application.

From a social point of view, it should be noted that digital tools can upset generally accepted social codes. It is therefore necessary to work on their acceptance as tools and not as ends in themselves. In addition, it is essential to show their social benefits. The notion of accountability and more generally of the relationship of our populations to power constitutes a major challenge in the sense that the population is not sufficiently informed of the notion of accountability and more generally is very often kept away from public affairs . Young people who are the majority online spend more time on entertainment than on rights, duties, democracy or development. Involving them in public life can be a long and complex process if they are not accompanied.

These challenges, as important as they are, remain within the reach of citizens and leaders to make mutual accountability a reality thanks to the multiple opportunities offered by Information and Communication Technologies. ICTs increase the quality of democracy, improve accountability, which in turn will imply improved governance and the restoration of trust between citizens and leaders on all sides. This will have a positive effect on the harmonious development of the country.