The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | They say Information is power and that an informed person is an empowered person, just like informed communities are empowered communities.
However, the level of how much people and communities are informed varies across, based on several factors, including urban-rural, education and income, and this also significantly determines how the communities are likely to respond to issues like government policies.
Ease of access to Information also helps governments to serve their citizens, by getting their views, feelings and needs, and also informing the people of the available services.
“For this to work, citizens need to be well-informed about the things that matter in their lives, and they need to have meaningful opportunities to input into government decision-making processes,” says Twaweza East Africa, a social research and information charity.
Technology has over time restructured the flow of information, allowing easier access, but also posing dangers like false, fake and misinformation.
As digital and internet-based sources of information take route, fears are that investment in conventional media, like newspapers, which are losing appeal, is waning and therefore, leaving some sections of the community at risk of an information blackout.
Yet, technology cannot serve everyone equitably, making the situation even worse, according to Twaweza, based on the fact that different people, even in Uganda, live different lives.
“This has always been the case, but, significantly, our media environment is increasingly becoming divided between a small, highly online group and the majority who never use the internet and continue to depend on the radio,” says Violet Alinda, Twaweza Country Lead in Uganda.
She says the risk here is that many people are left out of the important decision-making processes when discussions take place online.
“We need to protect the role of offline spaces for citizen to engage in public debate and make their voices heard, such as a community at meetings, while those of us who are active online should remind ourselves that what we see represented there is only a small minority of Uganda.”
Unfortunately, even where meetings happen, they are announced on phone-based apps or radio and those not on these two are left out.
The latest survey by Twaweza on how citizens’ habits are diverging shows that at least 73 percent of Ugandans attended a meeting in the previous year.
Yet, 28 percent of those who don’t usually attend meetings say they don’t get to know that one is taking place, while 29 percent say no meetings happen in their areas ND 19 percent have no time for meetings.
However, on a positive note, the report shows that meeting attendance has returned to pre-Covid 19 levels.
The “nationally representative high frequency” mobile phone survey featuring 2,741 respondents was carried out between January 9 and February 13 this year.
It shows that while radio remains the most popular source of information, this position has weakened from 79 percent seven years ago to 56 percent today, to the advantage of social media and the internet (websites).
Radio is increasingly being left to the rural, less literate, lower income and older persons, the opposite going for internet and digital app-based sources like WhatsApp (20 percent), Facebook 14 percent) and TikTok – the fastest growing – (9 percent).
The survey shows that Twitter and Instagram are also popular but only among the more educated and higher-income urban dwellers mainly in greater Kampala.
The Uganda Human Rights Commission hail the growing adaptation of modern ways of receiving and disseminating information but rues the negatives that come with them.
These include fake news, harassment, abuse, body shaming and misinformation among others that should be tackled in a review of the current laws, according to the UHRC.
****
URN
