Open
Parly

The Open Parly project involves live coverage and streaming of parliamentary sessions by young citizen journalists.This has been a first in Zimbabwe as local media even public/state media has not managed to provide full coverage of parliamentary business except for openings and anecdotal coverage. This has made parliament more transparent and provided the much-needed access by citizens to debates in parliament. This project has expanded on the continent with the launch of Zambia (Open Parly ZED), Nigeria (Open Parly Nigeria) and Somalia (Kalfadhi.com). Magamba is increasing young people’s access to Government data. The Open Parly handle has been named as “the 2nd most important twitter handle to follow in Zimbabwe by NewsVyb magazine.Using Innovation to Open up Democratic Space:

Open Parly launched Twitter Spaces discussions to discuss topical issues such as elections, bills, service delivery among many others. The Twitter spaces conversation was recognised by Twitter for curating inclusive platforms and being an initiative, which seeks to increase public access to parliamentary affairs in Zimbabwe and at the same time for hosting a panel discussion to address the pros and cons of mandatory voter registration in Zimbabwe. Open Parly has over 204 000 followers on Twitter.Magamba through Open Parly ZW launched the #ReconveneParly campaign
to encourage Parliament to reconvene and to meet virtually. The pressure contributed to Parliamentarians reconvening virtually. The campaign triggered debate online with 100 tweets, 352,524 potential reach and 7.4 million potential impressions.

Magamba launched its first ever Elections dashboard a few days before the March 26. It is a one-stop platform for citizens to follow election related updates, aggregated from different content creator platforms. By-elections in a bid to build up the hype and get traffic to the platform. We have built an Application Programming Interface (API) around this platform for anyone who has an interest to build onto what we have or using this as a Plug into their website. The dashboard generated 2 151 page views during the March 26 by-elections.