About MARS Group Kenya

About Mars Group Kenya

Mars Group Kenya is a leadership, governance, accountability and media watchdog organization and owner of www.marsgroupkenya.org, Kenya’s largest good governance information web portal. Mars Group Kenya is an Internet based organization, with offices in Nairobi, Kenya, that monitors and tracks all Kenyan public institutions and offices, including the Government, Media and Civil Society.

The Mars Group Kenya is a large local digital content generator and the owner of the largest database of governance information in Kenya. Since January 2007, the Mars Group has become a leading anti corruption and governance watchdog institution in Kenya, pioneering the use of the Internet to archive and index governance related information and conducting cutting edge research into some of the largest corruption scandals in Kenya. With over 2 terabytes of governance information on its websites, Mars Group Kenya documents and disseminates information for evidence-based-bottom-up-advocacy and support to civil society. It has over 8,000 registered subscribers who include individuals in government, the private sector, civil society, media, academia, and the international community. Registration to the web portal is free and in its first year of operation, it achieved over 20 million hits. It established its web portal with the objective of:

Exposing corruption and profiling leadership in Kenya
Informing Kenyans of their rights, entitlements, choices, and quality of public services
Providing tools and information to increase access to and use of available services
Supporting civil society organizations that strengthen links between communities and policy makers and have a multiplier effect including the Partnership for Change (initiated by Mars Group Kenya)
Promoting evidence based advocacy with regard to setting National Budget priorities and promoting effective bottom-up demand for accountable use of public funds by public institutions and officers.
Monitoring the Media and how it reports on Governance issues and events

The problem of corruption bad governance, human rights abuses and impunity in Kenya is made worse by scarcity of public information, which in turn secures impunity among public officers and elected officials. Government in Kenya holds a large amount of information particularly about service delivery and budgets, which are not publicly accessible, and there is no Freedom of Information law in Kenya to facilitate easy public access to essential information about Government functions and operations. Making such information available is a bottom up solution to impunity; in that, once people have information they are able to make informed decisions on how they are governed, what they will accept, and what they will demand from Government. Mars Group Kenya seeks to free information for public access via www.marsgroupkenya.org, an online Internet portal that Mars Group has built. Mars Group Kenya seeks to address issues for public engagement on democracy, good governance, and accountability.

The Mars Group Kenya portal is an anti-impunity online tool that presents comprehensive information on leadership, governance, accountability, and anti-corruption in Kenya. This information includes national and local budget resources.

The portal is technologically advanced and contains reports (official and non-official source), statutes, court documents, articles and media clips for reviewing, in 18 sub domains. The portal consolidates different information into one LGAP web portal site.

The portal uses enhanced web communication techniques such as multi-media, and other technology to allow a broader range of people to access information.
The portal is a living archive of important governance information and has the following aims:

Anti-Corruption: To stem corruption by using information technology and the internet to monitor, document and archive the mismanagement or loss of public funds.
Access to Information: To provide citizens with information on the leadership, governance structure and budgets of the Government of Kenya, so that they can monitor the performance of the Government.
Monitoring and Tracking: To develop and refine web-based tools for citizens to monitor government budgets and track public expenditures and public service delivery.
Transparency and Accountability: To harness and use information technology and the internet to increase transparency and accountability in the revenues and public expenditures of Kenya at national and local levels – including devolved funds.
Campaign and Advocacy: To encourage citizens to become actively involved in campaigning for good governance and to demonstrate how to directly petition the Government of Kenya on matters of national and public interest.
Youth Empowerment: To employ and train Kenyan youth in monitoring and advocacy for good governance.
Policy: To advocate and foster debate on new policy for Kenya including:

Development: to reverse the recurrent to development expenditure ratio in the Kenya National Budget to generate public knowledge of the need, and support, for a ratio of 40/60 (R/D) by 2009 budget
Debt: 100% Cancellation of Corrupt Debt Immediately: To have corrupt loans on the Kenya External Public Debt Register purged, and to obtain a commitment to vote money allocated to repayment to development expenditure; to generate demand for forgiveness of debts proven to be corrupt; to secure a commitment from the donor community in Kenya to support the cessation of repayment of corrupt external debt and the enforcement of law towards this end; and to clean the Kenya External Public Debt Register of corrupt external debt (e.g. as a first step the Anglo Leasing transactions, the Ken Ren transactions…)
Lean and Clean Government: To clean the Kenya National Budget and to remove unnecessary or wasteful expenditure from the Recurrent Budget. To generate public support for payroll cleaning - in the civil service and the disciplined forces, and procurement accountability
Restoration of Checks-and-Balances: to restore parliamentary oversight over the Kenya National Budget as a measure towards the reestablishment of check-and-balances between the three arms of the Kenya Government; to sponsor legislative change; and to enhance the capacity of parliamentary watchdog committees by information services and support

What the Mars Group Kenya Portal can do to Improve Governance in Kenya
Technology is the great leveler. Since Independence in December 1963, Kenyans have not enjoyed good governance and have suffered from impunity, grand corruption, abuse of their rights and skewing of the rule of law against them. Progressives are ranged against an extremely wealthy and violent system that is designed to stifle accountability voices and to retain power by the control of information amongst other things – the Mars Group portal provides free information to the public and thus supports an open society. Imagine mapping government (what it is, who is in it, how much money it has) – all at the touch of a finger)? As bandwidth costs are reduced in Kenya with the connection of the fibre-optic transmission system, Kenyan internet penetration increases. As users increase so does the influence of the web portal. And as Kenyans adopt new technology so will more information flow from web portals such as that of Mars Group directly to millions of Kenyans through such platforms as web-enabled cell phones, XML, RSS feeds.

The Mars Group portal is also a platform for introducing technology into the anti-corruption field. For example by overlaying its budget information, media archives, official reports and maps it is possible to demonstrate to, and educate Kenyans on, how Government is truly performing in the fight against corruption.
Other examples of benefits from the Mars Group Portal include

Awareness raising: e.g. for users of the constituency sub-domain they can track and monitor constituency development funds.
Constituents can check the antecedents of candidates in national and local level elections – they can also post information on development, and governance related issues.
The portal can be used to monitor election campaigns and processes, voter registration, national census, and – 24 hour a day media monitoring in digital form makes it easy to produce monitoring reports
Budget monitoring of ministries and state corporations, for fiscal discipline at the National level.
Publicizing government reports and official documents
Can be used for special interest campaigns of a macro-nature e.g. the campaign against corruption in the external public debt register morphs into debt rebate/ forgiveness
A tool to track public officials and thereby enhance scrutiny and accountability – can track the courts – can track the legislature – and of course the executive
Making accessible reports that otherwise disappear from mainstream media quickly
Enhance citizen state accountability –the web portal can achieve status that merits acceptance by official institutions e.g. parliament
Civic education tools developed to support civil society agenda e.g. transparency and accountability of public funds.
Resource centre – maximizes information use – frees up budgets for analysis and implementation – commercial future as with all databases
Designed to make users more aware of governance and accountability
Designed to make user more aware of how they can hold leadership or institutions accountable, vote smarter and contribute towards ending impunity

While Kenyans continue to demand accountability from the Government of Kenya and Parliament on the management of our Public Resources, the Government and National Assembly continue to ignore the public resulting in massive wasteful expenditure and massive irresponsible borrowing. There is a need to ensure that the next National Budget to be presented in June 2009 does not look like the last one.

The National Budget as presently constituted is enmeshed in corrupt and wasteful expenditure and there is need for Kenyans to educate each other on this so that we can pressure our representatives to scrutinize the budget to identify such expenditure. Savings can be used to boost development expenditure. Mars Group’s analysis of the budget points to numerous budget lines where Members of Parliament could have cut government expenditure: among these are the provisions in the national budget for foreign travel; fuel, utilities such as electricity and water; purchase and maintenance of motor vehicles; rent by the Government of premises; hospitality expenses; and taxation waivers and privileges of elected officials. Such waste has made the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals impossible and has in fact completely unbalanced the National Budget perhaps for years to come.

Short-term and long-term goals of Mars Group Kenya

1. Informing citizens to Improve Governance
In Kenya, essential public services are failing, especially for the poorest members of society. Conventional approaches to tackling this challenge have focused on tracking money spent rather than results achieved. Accountability to citizens and communities has largely been absent. Mars Group believes that providing meaningful, easily accessible information to citizens and communities, service providers, and policymakers is a key part of creating home-grown solutions to improve the quality of governance. Better information can help governments and other providers spend scarce resources wisely. And, empowered by information, citizens and communities can demand better services from providers or develop new solutions to meet their own needs.

2. Empowering citizens to demand a responsive parliament and government
Mars Group efforts will lead to empowered citizens and communities, a responsive Government, a responsive parliament and informed decision-makers, empowered Citizens and Communities

3. Empowering citizens to generate accountability
Mars Group objective is to generate accountability and "bottom up" citizen engagement to influence the quality of public services.

4. Innovative Access to Information
By providing easily accessible information to people so that they can choose the best strategy for themselves and their community Mars Group Kenya uses multiple modes of communication (such as media, mobile, internet and other technologies) to allow a broader range of people to access information. By using innovative methods for disseminating information, Mars Group Kenya is focused on:

Informing individuals and communities of their rights, entitlements, choices, and quality of public services
Providing tools and information to increase access to and use of available services
Supporting civil society organizations that strengthen links between communities and policy makers.

5. Increased transparency
Mars Group Kenya enhances public and private providers' abilities to respond to the challenges of service delivery and increased demand. Access to new tools and better information will increase providers' autonomy and flexibility, shifting away from "business as usual" approaches to public services. Top-down accountability has too often failed because it is difficult to know what happens on the ground in an information-scarce environment. We envision a Government and Parliament that are responsive to citizen needs and committed to improving performance. focused on:

Increasing transparency in budgeting and performance for improved resource allocation
Improving data quality to inform planning
Expanding service delivery with innovative information-based tools

6. Informed Decision-Makers
Mars group Kenya works to enhance the quality and quantity of data and evidence available for policymaking. To "unlock" existing data that is not publicly available, Mars Group Kenya is seeking innovations in the way data can be accessed, entered, stored, analyzed and communicated. Data has been used to advise Parliamentarians on budget debates and the government sub-domain is linked to the Joint Donor website.

7. Checks and Balances
Mars Group Kenya believes that the transparency that comes with information that is more public increases checks and balances between citizens and communities, and policymakers.

8. Data Collection capacity
Mars Group Kenya develops local capacity for data collection and analysis to inform decision making existing information more public and useful for planning and advocacy Generating evidence on "what works" and shares this information widely.

9. Open Society
Mars Group Kenya is freeing information to create an open society in Kenya.

10. Freedom, democracy and a place called Change
Mars Group Kenya is committed to Change and Democracy in Kenya. The Mars Group Kenya team is made up of Patriotic Kenyans who want to see all Kenyans find that place called change. Where there is democracy, freedom, and the same rules for all. That place, where the Rule of Law prevails.

Follow Mars Group Kenya on Twitter

Follow Mars Group Kenya on Facebook