This document discusses challenges to deepening democracy through increased citizen participation and proposes an initiative to address these challenges. It identifies three main challenges: 1) lack of leadership champions for participatory initiatives, 2) lack of agreement on the role of non-electoral citizen participation, and 3) initiatives that are trivial in scope. The proposed initiative aims to increase citizen engagement, government transparency and legitimacy, and policy outcomes. It will use a non-profit partner and information and communication technologies to facilitate engagement and will evaluate success using various indicators to measure inputs, outputs, processes, outcomes and impacts.

1. Hassan Adamu Danguguwa Engaging Citizen Final Project
The societal problem: Although initiatives in participatory governance have proliferated in
many domains in recent years, many challenges to deepening democracy through increased
citizen participation remain. Consider briefly three of these. The first is leadership. It is almost
tautological to observe that every significant participatory innovation has a champion, or set of
champions, in government or civil society that has the creativity to adapt some participatory
design to particular needs and circumstances, the political savvy to identify and organize allies in
this endeavor, and the perseverance to see the enterprise through. Leadership in participatory
innovation has been fickle because its sources have been opportunistic and, for the most part,
unsystematic.
A second problem, related to the first, is the lack of a broad popular articulation and
agreement on the role of non-electoral public participation in contemporary democratic
institutions. While there are disagreements on the edges of representative democracy, there is
broad understanding and agreement on core institutions and practices such as equal universal
suffrage and regular competitive elections.
A third problem, related to the prior two, is triviality. Although the number of
participatory governance innovations seems to have proliferated in recent years, the reach of
many of those innovations is quite limited, even to the point of rendering them trivial. This is the
park bench problem.
Citizen participation is also sometimes seen as a solution to a quite different problem:
shoring up the democratic legitimacy of governance processes. Representative democratic
governance now faces several critical legitimating problems
The Objectives are:
 To understand the theoretical underpinnings of citizen engagement and why it is a critical
component of good governance.
 To evaluate current citizen engagement initiatives for development around the world.
 Increase transparency and citizen trust in government
 Enhance government legitimacy
 Improve outcomes of macro-economic policies, and
 Raise the frequency and quality of government responsiveness
The initiative will lead to a positive change because:
 Citizen engagement require transparent and effective mechanism by government for
responding to citizen voice.
 Citizen engagement is high embedded in the nature of the political and government context
and in exiting power relations.
 Citizen engagement is the ultimate client of government or development institutions and
private sector interventions in a country.

2. Hassan Adamu Danguguwa Engaging Citizen Final Project
 It explores underlying theories and concepts of citizen engagement, examines the role it can
play in improving policymaking and public service delivery, and investigates the impact of
new technologies, particularly in developing countries. Participants can contribute their own
insights and connect with others through online forums.
The key players are Government and the Citizens
1. Government are the spearheading of this initiative, they are in the best place to do
because government are the policy makers and the rulers of the citizens
2. The target audience are the community
3. Yes, there is a need to partner with an Organisation such as NGO`s

3. Hassan Adamu Danguguwa Engaging Citizen Final Project
Civic mobilization is most often facilitated by intermediaries such as NGOs to spur
citizens into action and support their demands vis-a-vis the state. But State officials also
need to be mobilized. Therefore, an interface is necessary to allow both citizens and state
actors, or coalitions that cut across these two types of actors, to interact.
1. The tools that I’m going to use to reach my objective are to use a non-profit
organization. Example like The National Democratic Institute
(NDI) which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to support and
strengthen democratic institutions worldwide through citizen participation,
openness and accountability in government. And Information and
Communication Technology (ICT)
2. Information and communication technologies (ICT) bring a lot of changes in
different aspects of our lives. The implementation of ICT in different
environments brings different kinds of transformation to the environment.
These transformations are observed in mailing systems, transportation,

4. Hassan Adamu Danguguwa Engaging Citizen Final Project
teaching and learning, communication, etc. Among these, ICT changed
urban life not only technically but also philosophically and systematically.
Some examples are e-participation, e-government and e-democracy
3. My initiative will work because nowadays ICT is a premier resource for
sharing and expanding knowledge on appropriate information and
communication technologies (ICT) and the implementation processes that
can make them sustainable in rural and underserved communities across the
developing world.
The challenges my initiatives might face and how to overcome them are:
I. How to ensure an accurate representation of a variety of interests in society
II. Start at local level (with small rural communities)
III. Multichannel consultation methodology.
IV. Increase role of Social Media
V. Cross-selling. Use of already existent communication
VI. Partner with Civil Society Organizations (CSOs)
VII. Partner with Mass Media organizations
The indicators I will use to evaluate success are
I. Input indicators
II. Output Indicators
III. Process Indicator
IV. Outcome Indicator
V. Impact Indicator
The reason why these are the most important indicators are:

5. Hassan Adamu Danguguwa Engaging Citizen Final Project
It is important to specify the ICT inputs amount, type, and location of ICT resources
when determining the role that ICT played in citizen’s knowledge, skills and attitudes. These
need to be identified and described whether or not an increase in the number of these resources is
an explicit part of the ICT-supported program. Output indicators report on the results of
program efforts (inputs and processes/activities) at the program level, Process indicators reflect
whether a program is being carried out as planned and how well program activities are being
carried out, Outcome indicators measure the program’s level of success in improving service
accessibility, utilization or quality. These types of indicators are often reported as percentages or
rates, such as the percentage of the population with knowledge of ICT, Impact
indicators measure the long-term, cumulative effects of programs over time on the larger social
system
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