Background

The Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network (APKN) is now the permanent institutional home for the Guidelines. The APKN will set up a Board of Editors that under the aegis of Pan African Parliament will have the official and formal responsibility to make institutional decisions relating to the Guidelines.

The Guidelines are available on the web site of APKN at the following address http://drafting.apkn.org. The Guidelines are currently available in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish, other languages may be added if requested to the maximum extent feasible.

Training

A. Training materials will be developed to provide self-study in the Guidelines. The training materials will consist principally of electronic materials (e-Modules). The training materials will include:

• basic modules that provide an overview of the Guidelines for those who want only an overview, and an introduction to the Guidelines for those who want to continue with the advanced modules;
• advanced modules that provide detailed coverage of each Guideline;
• supplementary modules that provide coverage on legislative drafting generally, as well as on other topics related to the Guidelines.

B. The training materials will also include training guides and reference manuals that can be used by teachers or trainers who are carrying out training sessions for groups of trainees.

C. The training materials will also include exercises, with possible solutions and a discussion of various useful approaches, so that trainees can attempt to solve real-life drafting problems by applying the Guidelines and can benefit from examples and feedback.

D. As a whole, the training materials should include a complete and thorough package of materials that collectively could be used by a local organisation to provide training in the Guidelines with little if any need for ongoing outside help. However, the producers of the training materials should remain available to provide outside help to users of the training materials.

E. Once developed, the training materials will be made available online.

F. The development and dissemination of the training materials will be done in coordination with other organizations that carry out training and capacity building relating to legislative drafting, to minimize duplication of effort and take advantage of any synergies that are available.

Promotion

A. Efforts will be made to identify and reach out to stakeholders, to let them know about the Guidelines and about the Workplan and to invite them to become involved. The categories of stakeholders include:

• individuals, and associations of individuals, such as drafters of legislation and regulations, policymakers, information and communications technology (ICT) professionals, law professors, judges;
• African parliaments and organizations of African parliaments, such as APKN;
• organisations that are involved in training or capacity building in legislative drafting in Africa, such as universities and law schools generally, but also the United Nations, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the International Center for Law and Development (ICLAD), the Sir William Dale Centre for Legislative Studies, and so on.

B. Efforts will be made to encourage and facilitate the creation of groups of stakeholders to further the purposes of this Workplan. For example, an effort will be made, through APKN or otherwise, to support a network of legislative drafters in Africa. Likewise, an effort will be made to coordinate with organisations that are involved in training or capacity building in legislative drafting in Africa.

C. Particular emphasis will be given to stakeholders in, or with demonstrated connections to, Africa.

Further Development and Refinement

The Guidelines will continue to be developed and refined over time. This will include changes to the Guidelines themselves, but also the addition of commentaries, examples, and other aids. Likewise, this will also include the development and refinement of regional, local, and tradition-specific variants or extensions of the Guidelines, when warranted, with commentaries, examples, and other aids. This will also include translating the Guidelines into additional languages (and revising the translations that do exist, where improvements in translation are identified).

The board of editors will continue to operate in the near term in the manner it has operated, but will work toward establishing a set of governing principles for the board itself. The governing principles will address issues that may arise from time to time about membership on the board, leadership of the board, and resolution of differences of opinion among the members.

The board of editors of the Guidelines will also establish a set of procedures and mechanisms to be used by people who want to propose changes, variants, extensions, translations, or any other matters relating to the Guidelines, and to be used by the board of editors in considering and acting upon such proposals.

Other Activities for Capacity Building in Legislative Drafting

A. A repository will be established for resources useful to capacity building in legislative drafting. Particular emphasis will be given to resources developed in Africa and to resources developed specifically for Africa. Resources may include articles and other original documents; indexes and other research tools; directories of experts and other stakeholders; and so on. Through the repository, the resources will be made broadly available.

B. A forum will be established at APKN for legislative drafters and other stakeholders can interact and exchange information and experiences toward building capacity in legislative drafting in Africa. In connection with the forum, a searchable repository of questions and answers will be developed so that problems and solutions can be better shared.

C. Efforts will be made to promote the use of the bill drafting editor developed by the UNDESA Africa I-Parliament Action Team.

The function of legislation - Legislative drafting and the policy process - Legislative drafting and ethics - Legislative process - The role and responsibility of the legislative drafter.

To be developed!

Explanations of a bill’s intent - Roles of the drafter and bill clerks;

To be developed!

Understanding why some agencies fail to implement effectively, and understanding the legislative options that are available.

To be developed!

The key benefit of providing information and research services in support of “Evidence-based Policy Making” (EbPM) is producing better policies that are effective and forward-looking.  Members need to be able to apply sound evidence to the policy making process rather than respond to short-term pressures so that they address the causes and not just the symptoms of problems.

Evidence for policy has three main components:

• validated data (facts, trends, survey information);
• analytical reasoning that sets the data in context;
• stakeholder opinions on an issue or set of issues.

Through this comprehensive approach policy-makers can ensure that all points of view are considered and the available evidence is applied appropriately.

The topics proposed are meant to:

• provide training materials on topics related to evidence-based policymaking;
• promote the use of applications that support evidence-based policymaking;
• carry out other activities for capacity building in evidence-based policymaking.

Training

A. Training materials will be developed to provide self-study on topics related to evidence-based policymaking. The training materials will consist principally of electronic materials (e-Modules).

The training materials will include:

• basic modules that provide an overview of the topic for those who want only an overview, and an introduction to the topic for those who want to continue with the advanced modules;
• advanced modules that provide detailed coverage of the topic.

B. The topics covered by the training materials will include:

• determining expected impacts of new laws;
• preparing and using a research report;
• tracking and monitoring legislation;
• how to work effectively with a legislative drafter;
• effective public policy management within the parliamentary context;
• effective technical writing;
• intraparliamentary networking and lobbying;
• ensuring legislation is implemented effectively once enacted and monitoring on an ongoing basis the effects of legislation and the extent of compliance with legislation.

C. The training materials will also include training guides and reference manuals that can be used by teachers or trainers who are carrying out training sessions for groups of trainees.

D. As a whole, the training materials should include a complete and thorough package of materials that collectively could be used by a local organisation to provide training in the topic with little if any need for ongoing outside help. However, the producers of the training materials should remain available to provide outside help to users of the training materials.

E. Once developed, the training materials will be made available online.

F. The development and dissemination of the training materials will be done in coordination with other organizations that carry out training and capacity building relating to evidence-based policymaking, to minimize duplication of effort and take advantage of any synergies that are available.

Promotion of Applications

Efforts will be made to promote the use of applications that support evidence-based policymaking. The applications to be supported include:

• Africa News Monitor (ANM)
• Africa Parliamentary Information Exchange (APEX)

Other Activities for Capacity Building in Evidence-Based Policymaking

A. A repository will be established at APKN for resources useful to capacity building in evidence-based policymaking. A particular emphasis will be given to resources developed in Africa and to resources developed specifically for Africa. Resources may include articles and other original documents; indexes and other research tools; directories of experts and other stakeholders; and so on. Through the repository, the resources will be made broadly available.

B. A forum will be established at APKN for researchers, analysts, policymakers, and other stakeholders can interact and exchange information and experiences toward building capacity in evidence-based policymaking in Africa.

Rationale

Public institutions, private companies and NGOs and civil societies increasingly rely on fast and accurate information both to monitor media coverage of policy areas and to respond to unexpected events. Some services and agencies are setting up early warning response systems for crisis management.

Policy monitoring and assessment is helped by gauging public response and the news. Citizens and civil society organisations can better monitor issues of concern and the activities of public institutions with customisable news services. Statistics about news trends provide rapid feedback to anybody who may be concerned with the impact of events, policies etc.

It is more and more important to be able to access information services that rely on an impartial aggregation of sources and are free from commercial, national or political interests.

Data mining techniques now allow automatic extraction of names, places and topics and can identify associations across languages from reports, news, social networks etc. This can provide valuable and unbiased insights, and identify trends.

Africa News Monitor

Africa News Monitor (ANM - anm.apkn.org) is be based on data mining technologies developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). These techniques are currently being deployed in the form of the Europe Media Monitor (EMM, press.jrc.it). As with EMM, the system will gather on-line news reports from news portals world wide, in different languages, analyse and classify the content of the reports, aggregate the information, issue alerts and produce intuitive visual presentations of the information found.

Features

ANM NewsBrief

The ANM NewsBrief will show the hottest topics reported during the last few minutes and hours across multiple news sources from around the world focusing particularly on African sources or Africa related sources. Constantly updated, the site will group related news, show timelines and display the biggest stories first.

It will also be possible to browse news by subject as all news is automatically categorised into hundreds of customer-oriented (and customer defined) subject domains and according to the countries mentioned in the articles. Users will be able to choose to see only news falling into specific subjects or concerning countries of their choice.

Information about people, organisations and countries

All associated information, people and organisations mentioned, and possibly location information will be displayed alongside the articles. The stories themselves can be viewed on a map.

The system will keep track of co-occurrences of people and organisations in the news and use this information to build networks of people than can be explored graphically. The system does take into consideration multilingual spelling variants for the same person so that users can search for information about persons independently of the name spelling. The system will update its list of known entities in the news on a regular basis from a resource provided (and updated) by the JRC. It will also be possible to provide a ‘custom’ list in addition to the main resource.

Linking related news across languages

The perspective on individual issues often differs from one country to the next. Seeing related news coming from different countries or written in different languages next to each other can be very informative. Using unique technology, Africa News Monitor will automatically detects related news clusters across languages and allows users - with one simple click - to access foreign language news about the same subject or event. For languages spoken in more than one country (e.g. English or French), users can additionally opt to read the news produced in only one of these countries.

Detecting trends over time

News clusters will be automatically linked to the related news of previous days and months. Timelines show developments over time and allow users to jump to the origin or to peaks of each story. Separate sections displaying news stories that started in the last week or in the last month allow users to get up to date with recent developments.

To do:

Currently the ANM Portal (anm.apkn.org) news comes from RSS feeds of the demo site developed by JRC of the European Commission. The JRC will soon create a new dedicated server on which we will begin to “Africanise”, This will begin with:

• dividing the news sources in “from Africa”, news sources  and “about Africa” so that it will be possible to monitor both what the news from Africa newspaper and magazines and the news about africa from newspapers and magazines from Europe, Asia, etc;
•  Adding and maintaining sources with specific attention to Africa;
• Adding/changing category definitions with specific attention to Africa agenda and priorities.

Exchanging information among African parliaments has become even more important with the creation of the Pan African Parliament (PAP). Africa Parliamentary Information Exchange (APEX - apex.apkn.org) is meant to improve co-ordination between National Parliaments and the Pan Africa Parliament, to facilitate the flow of information among national parliaments and to expand the information base available to national parliaments with regard to cross-national initiatives, specific PAP and AU issues.

APEX provides a platform for the electronic exchange of Pan African related information between parliaments in Africa.

All national parliaments in Africa may partcipate with the degree of involvement decided upon by each parliament. Each parliament is responsible for informing the other parliaments on its activities concerning cross-national initiatives and the recommendations of the Pan African Parliament.

Objectives

• Function as a portal for information concerning substantial and procedural questions with regard to scrutiny in PAP matters by providing suitable tools for exchanging information;
• Facilitate communication and co-operation between the African parliaments by enabling them to freely exchange information;
• Promote best practices between parliaments. 

To do:

Currently online we have a very preliminary prototype apex.apkn.org where we have only available a Parliamentary Directory that contains contact information of all the African parliaments. The current basic information could be enriched with information about the political and administrative leadership of each institution.

We are have foreseen the possibility to allow each parliament to add information on:

• Parliamentary Directory;
• Bills on floor and their progresses;
• Resolutions presented and debated and the outcome of them;
• Committees activities;
• Inter-parliamentary initiatives;

Each Parliament is free to share documents and information to the extend that better suit them but each parliament is encouraged to inform the other parliaments of its activities and more specifically the ones concerning cross-national initiatives and the resolutions/activities of the Pan African Parliament.

The system will allow to browse information by;

• country;
• topic;
• date;

There will also be the possibility to subscribe to a newsletter or RSS to be updated on the latest additions.

The focus will be on the development of online digests regarding best-practices and technical guidelines on specific issues like: parliamentary websites; ICT infrastructure and architecture, network usage policy; e-mail and Internet acceptable usage policy; system security policy; privacy; archiving policies and practices; etc.

Research papers on technical subjects may also be developed if required but the main focus will be on creating digests of the online resources structure as a learning path that spells out steps and phases and provides links to relevant resources to deal with specific issues.

The digests will be regularly updated and will also benefit form the feedback from users.

To be developed!

The management of information/document is at the base of any parliamentary activities and  ICT  is undoubtedly the most powerful tool that we have currently have to manage parliamentary information/documents. Despite this in many parliaments ICTs and management of information and documents has not yet been given the required shared of resources and it has not yet become one of the core services of parliaments.

Parliaments need to adopt adequate governance models to handle what should be one of the most critical support services of a parliaments. Parliaments need to institutionalize information and knowledge management and make sure that enough resources are allocated to address the parliament’s strategic information management and technology priorities.

In this context possible areas on which to focus are:

• Establishment of dedicated ICT Steering Committees to drive and support modernization efforts in parliaments.
  Efforts of ICTs staff need both the guidance and support of the management of Parliaments in order to move on with any modernization within parliaments. The stetting up of ICT Steering Committees bringing together MPs, administrative management and IT managers has a proven record of being able to create the required momentum to lead to a successful deployment of ICT.

• Institutionalisation of the Chief Information Officer.
  Parliaments need to consider the institutionalisation of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) to ensure that the allocation of parliament’s knowledge management resources support the needs of the parliament and reflect the parliament’s strategic information management and technology priorities.

• ICT Service: establishing, managing, and supporting.
  Developing an ICT service structure that meets parliament's operational needs is essential. One of the most critical challenges confronting parliaments is to put in place an ICT service whose goals are clearly in line with the goals of the parliament at large.

• Institutionalisation: A professional and highly competent ICT staff who can provide critical services is essential to ensuring that a parliament can fulfill its legislative and representational mandates.  Staff must be well trained and be provided with opportunities for continuous learning.
• Establishing learning and professional development strategies. Through the use of skill-matrices and self-assessment tools, parliaments can assess their capacity level and evaluate the gaps in capacities and skills that may need to filled.

Parliaments need to build the managerial and technical skills of their staff to deal with challenges of the deployment of ICT in Parliaments.

In this context possible areas on which to focus are:

ICT managerial skills

• Vision: Vision and goals for ICT;
• Planning: Strategic planning; Programme / project formulation; Business case development: cost/benefit analysis;
• Management & Implementation: Leadership and high level management; Project management; Requirements management; Test management & quality assurance; Enterprise architecture (management); Financial management budgeting; Staffing and staff development;
• Standards & compliance: access to documents, privacy, security and liabilities policies; etc.

ICT technical skills

• Training Needs Assessment - Skills matrices and self assessment tools will enable parliaments to determine what skills and knowledge are needed for their members and staff and to assess the current level of those skills and knowledge. Based on the outcome of the assessment specific traming module that are most common to all could be developed to fill the training gaps.
• Bungeni WebTechLearning Resources:  learning modules on web technologies (CSS, Java, XHTML, RSS feeds, AJAX); information systems (Library Information System – Koha; Institutional Digital Repository – Dspace ; Content Management System – Plone/Zope; Bungeni Portal and Editor – functionalities, customizations, etc.
• AKOMA NTOSO XMLearning Resources: learning modules on XML families of technologies with specific reference to the management of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents, and more specifically focusing on learning, customization and deployment of XML technologies in general and with specific reference to AKOMA NTOSO standards.

By exercising their legislative, representative, and oversight functions and responsibilities, parliaments can address the challenges associated with creating an equitable information society and play a leadership role in this field.

In this context possible areas on which to focus are:

• Legislative frameworks and institutional architectures: Role of Parliament in advancing the Information Society.
  In a sector as dynamic as ICT, implementation strategies and policy outcomes need to be constantly monitored and evaluated and decision-makers nimble and responsive to change while ensuring long term stability and certainty. Governance is a determining factor of successful communications sector reform.

• Internet rights and governance: Guaranteeing fundamental rights.
  Parliaments have to deal with new challenges of promoting, regulating and safeguarding the development of an equitable Information Society. The main issues here are: expanding opportunities for citizens to access public information and actively participate in policy formulation; ensuring citizen rights of expression in the evolving Internet world; data protection and cyber-crimes. The deployment of the new technologies should be monitored and appraised not only in terms of economic development but also of the need to protect the citizen’s rights and the more deprived and disadvantaged sectors of society.

• Information Society and Knowledge Economy: accessibility and collective interest.
  Access to knowledge is an issue in the Information Society that is characterised by the constant creation of knowledge, whose scarcity is not primarily the effect of naturally-occurring events but of deliberate commercial policies. This artificially-created scarcity of information/knowledge could deprive millions of people of extraordinary possibilities for their individual and communal growth especially in Africa where access to knowledge is also key for its development.

• Open Source Software and Open Standards.
  The Internet owes its explosive growth and impact to its foundation on open standards and open software. Studies indicate that moving from proprietary software to open standards and open source software in public administration may have a considerable economic impact. African parliaments now have the opportunity to participate in, and benefit from, the open software movement. Legislative support for open software and open standards also has the potential to influence the development of the information technology industry in Africa positively. Enabling greater user control of software and systems development in Africa could mean both more opportunities to localise applications to the specific situation and languages and also to build synergies for a more indigenous and sustainable software industry.

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