Awareness

The Right to Information (RTI) is recognized as one of the most powerful institutional tools for advancing transparency, accountability, and democratic governance. By granting citizens the legal right to access information held by public authorities, RTI strengthens oversight, enhances public participation, and improves the quality of decision-making.

In this way, RTI serves not only as a transparency mechanism but as a foundational pillar of open government. In West Africa, while the importance of RTI is particularly pronounced, the subregion continues to face persistent governance challenges, with corruption undermining public service delivery, weakening state legitimacy, and diverting scarce resources away from critical sectors such as health, education, and infrastructure.

Against this backdrop, strengthening, institutionalizing RTI and enhancing the implementation and effectiveness of RTI laws across West Africa represents a critical pathway toward combating corruption and strengthening democratic governance.

Therefore, as part of the SICEA Project, we developed several awareness-raising tools and organized on-the-ground outreach activities focused on the RTI, the need to adopt national legal frameworks that support the exercise of this right-including the protection of whistleblowers- the establishment and operationalization of access-to-information bodies, the digitization, and the need for citizens to effectively exercise their rights to access information, etc.