Toro Development Network

As part of Uganda’s Vision 2040 and related National Development Plans, the government of Uganda has focused on urbanization as key to economic growth. This requires regional and strategic cities beyond Kampala, and to that end, since 2020, the government has been reorganizing the administration of several existing major towns into “new cities.” This will create new opportunities, but it will also put a strain on infrastructure and services. As a result, data and evidence use in decision making at this urban level, together with sound governance of that data and evidence, will be critical to these new cities’ success. To prepare for this, three current Hewlett Foundation grantees based in Uganda — Sunbird AI, UN Global Pulse Lab Kampala, and ToroDev — have been working together with the new city authorities in Fort Portal and Jinja to identify these cities’ core data and evidence needs; train city officials on how to use data and evidence to make decisions; support the institutionalization of data use at the city level; and pilot new data and AI technologies to aid in decision making. This supplemental grant is for ToroDev’s portion of the collaboration and will build directly off of the recommendations it made and the coalitions it created during the urban data governance baselining project it conducted in 2022-23. (Strategy: Evidence-Informed Policymaking)

While the field of data governance in Africa continues to mature at both the continental and national level, work is also needed at the subnational level, and especially cities. To that end, ToroDev — a Ugandan research and advocacy organization with extensive experience working at the nexus of transparency, participation, and accountability, as well as evidence-informed policymaking — is undertaking a baseline study of the current state and future needs of urban-level data governance in Uganda. The project is examining the challenges and opportunities of urban data governance in East Africa by developing case studies of two very different Ugandan cities: Fort Portal (a city with a strong tourism base) and Hoima (a city with an extractives base). An intensive literature review combined with an online survey are also being conducted in other African countries and cities to compare with the situation in Uganda. Together, this multipronged effort will draw out broader lessons learned and policy recommendations for data governance in African urban settings. This grant is a supplement to the main grant for this work dating from May 2022. It will be used to more fully engage key stakeholders and researchers by expanding the scope to more cities in Uganda, and more closely involve the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, and Ministry of Local Government. This grant is part of a cluster of grants under the Evidence-Informed Policymaking strategy to strengthen a field of African institutions working on data governance. The goal of this cluster is to help governments in East and West Africa develop policy frameworks that balance public good uses of data with data privacy and protection.