 Good morning. Yes, I think that has a very nice presentation. I'm afraid mine is not going to be as colorful and as fancy. So my name is Eshban Quesiga from Parliament Watch Uganda. What we do at Parliament Watch is simple. I mean, we like to tell people that our work essentially involves bridging the gap between Parliament and the people. When we started out in 2013, we had an idea, essentially, Facebook and Twitter had become a big deal in Uganda. And there were a lot of political discourse and political conversations happening on those platforms. The presidential elections that had happened two years before had also taught us that really those two platforms, Facebook and Twitter, were going to be where most of the political discussions were going to happen. But in 2013, there wasn't a lot of information coming out of Parliament. And I hope that most of you would agree that a lot of political discussions are really generated by the content that comes out of Parliament. So we took a phone, a smartphone, and went inside Parliament. And we started to live-tweet what was happening in parliamentary committee meetings. So essentially, it looked like this. So at any given time, we have about eight people who will sit in committee meetings and they will live-tweet discussions that are happening in committee meetings and in plenary. Now, what we didn't expect was that the online community that had, I think, for a very long time that had been discussing what we consider trivial issues took a very keen interest in it. Because as it turns out, a lot of the discussions in Parliament also have some relevancy to mainstream audiences. So this was something last week, although I discussed in the sexual offenses bill. So if you follow us on Twitter, you'll keep getting live minute by the minute updates of what MPs are saying. But since then, in a space of about four years, our users have grown from zero to 114,000. And that is maybe about 50,000 on Twitter, 20,000 on Facebook, and the others that use our newsletters and visit our websites. So what we didn't anticipate going into this was that we would become the source for information on Parliament. This graph here shows that, so we've been tracking organizations and individuals that come to us for this information. And it shows that civil society ranks number one, followed by the Parliament of Uganda, which was ironic for us because we got the information from them, followed by members of the mainstream press, and embassies, law firms, students. So almost without planning it, we became this central repository of the place that you go to to get to access information of what's happening in Parliament. So our work started to evolve a little bit from just being people that provide information to, that came too soon, being people that provide information to doing a lot more. So we decided, look here, our work is not just going to be to provide information. I think let us start bridging that gap between Parliament and the people. At that time, there were very, very few members of Parliament on Twitter or Facebook. So we launched a campaign or training to encourage them to join Facebook and Twitter because it became obvious to us that people were interested in what MPs were saying. They were interested in information coming out of Parliament. But there was no way to access it. Now the institution that was Parliament, the institution that is Parliament, was not so forthcoming. So what we did was we worked with individual members of Parliament. And this is what happened. So the graph in blue shows what it looked like before we started conducting the trainings. I don't know if you guys can. Yeah. So the buzz in blue shows what it looks like before we started conducting the trainings. And so the first set, those were the number of tweets. And when we conducted the trainings, there was a 25 increment in the number of tweets going out from members of Parliament. So obviously we need to do more teaching them or training them how to tweet more. Then we also need to do more on the number of people that they follow. But what impressed us was the number of people that followed them. So I mean, for a long time, people had already said discussions on Parliament and what our MPs are up to is something that is only of interest to civil society, political players, and academia. That small circle. But the number of followers that MPs were able to get indicated to us that there was some mainstream interest and demand of what MPs were saying and what their ideas were. So in 2016, after the general election, we put together a list of the new members of Parliament. And this is what it looked like. If it gives you a little headache, you should know it gave us headache as well. Because we had decided that our work was going to be to present Parliament to the people, we had no idea what to do with this. We spent some time thinking about it. And 2016, it became obvious to us that it was important to just change how we do. So this is generally a list of members of Parliament, their constituencies, their districts, their political parties. It also included gender and their phone numbers. And we came up with something like this. So this is basically the same content that I just showed you, but in a more graphical form. And when we put this out, the feedback that we got was incredible. As in this simple graph alone made our followers, our followers spiked by about 10% in a very short time. So it became obvious to us that we couldn't just be the people that were just putting out information the way it was or the way we had received it. We wouldn't just scan a document and upload it on the website. It was important to visualize the information and also interpret it as well. So this shows a graph of, this shows a pictorial representation of the political parties in Uganda. As you can see, one of them has close to 72% of the entire house. So that makes it very easy for them to pass legislation. But looking at the information like this also helped us understand some of the decisions that Parliament had made in the past that nobody had a clear explanation to or some of the ways that our Parliament had acted that some of the ways our Parliament had acted for which there was very limited analysis. So when we looked at the gender representation in Parliament, it helped us understand a lot of the laws, especially laws that affect women, how they had been passed or how long it took specific laws to be passed. So we essentially moved from where the guys who provide information here have it to where the guys who look at the information break it down, present it in a pictorial form and then provide analysis for it. So this graph alone helped us understand some of the laws, especially the laws that affect women and why they had been passed the way they are. An example would be, so for about nine years now, there's been a proposed law to criminalize marital rape in Uganda. The average time it takes to pass a political bill in Kampala in Uganda is about two months. We recently had our president pass a law to remove the presidential age limit. It took them less than 60, took them about 50 days to do it. A simple law that criminalizes a thing like marital rape has taken nine years and part of that is because of the way that the gender ratio is really set up in Parliament. Sorry. And part of that is really because of the way the gender ratio is really set up in Parliament and the cost of a cocktail of other reasons. So we've now moved from information to analysis. But we find that the more we look at information coming out of Parliament and the more we dig through layers of what's in our Parliament, it helps us and political players within Kampala, civil society organizations, to understand how to go about the work that they do. So for a very long time, people in Uganda had said that Uganda passes poor laws because our Parliament is not educated enough. The basic minimum to become a member of Parliament in Uganda is to have what I think in the UK would probably be an A level certificate. So but when we looked at the numbers and when we, so this is basically us essentially getting a list of MPs and looking at their qualifications, looking at their political affiliations and coming up with things like this, we learned that the Ugandan Parliament is very, very educated. And for a very long time, civil society had proposed solutions with the idea that you're dealing with a very uneducated bunch. So from that, so we've moved to just analysis to now being able to provide information that not only informs our work, but informs generally the development organizations and civil society in Uganda as a whole. So still on marito rape. So for some time, for the time that we spent having the discussion on marito rape, a lot of people said, you know, it's in the next Parliament, it's going to get better because we have the number, the ratio of men to women is equalizing. This shows how that has progressed since 1989 to 2011. And going by that sequence, for those of you who just remember like elementary math, it showed that it would take maybe about 15 years until the time it will take at least 15 years for the number of women and men in the Ugandan Parliament to be equal. So it might take roughly 15 years for them to pass legislation on marito rape. That's just my speculation. So, but the longer that we've spent in Parliament, we are consistently, you know, like an arthing on our uncovering information that we find is very, very exciting, especially to the press and to mainstream audiences. So we started looking at the budget for a very long time. The Ugandan press had covered the budget, but there are so many things that they never covered. So if you dig through layers and layers of pamphlets and books and papers, you'll find something that we refer to as the unfunded priorities. So these are things that are important, but there's no money, at least that's what the government says. I don't know if this is clear to the people at the back, but one of them is ARVs, Drugs for HIV AIDS, Recruitment of Health Workers, Construction of a Radiotherapy Banker for Cancer. So for a long time, the press ourselves included had covered the budget, but we had only gone as far as saying, you know, this is the national budget, this is how much is going to health, this is how much is going to education. But this information allowed us to, you know, generate a national conversation on this thing that they call unfunded priorities. They say it's important, but then they say, you know, but then they say that they will not provide money for it. And the work that we've been doing at Parliament watches to dig through tons and tons of paperwork and find information like this to put it out there. So this was information that we found on who owns the capital, who owns the health facilities in Kampala. The Ugandan government spends a lot of money on health. I think for a very long time, it was understood that this money is also spent within the capital city. Kampala is the capital city of Uganda, for those that might not know. For a very long time, there was an assumption that this money is also spent within the city. So this graph shows that this money actually wasn't contrary to the public narrative and the government narrative, as well as the conversations happening in Parliament, that a lot of money in the health sector was being spent on health facilities in the city. Kampala is a population of about four million by day, and it's one of those, it's one of the places that really gets the least funding as far as the health sector goes. This was information that we uncovered for the education sector. So at Parliament, what our business is to present, want to present information, but also information that is driven at keeping government honest and preventing false narratives, opening up the data that government has. But we're also not shy to publish information that is, that makes the government look good as long as it's true. So for a long time there was a narrative that government wasn't spending enough on education, and what we did was we pulled up this data that showed that over the years, 2013, now you have to look at the pencil, 2013, 14, 15 government spending on education had been increasing, and we keep telling our development partners, Parliament as well, that we are not in the business of bashing government, we are in the business of opening up government data and providing government information regardless of whether it makes you look good or bad. You remember this? So this was the training, these were the results from the training that we did with members of Parliament. Like I said specifically because we are really keen on opening up Parliament, not just making the data accessible, but to making members of Parliament accessible as well. In Uganda, most of the places you'd meet your member of Parliament would be at a wedding, at a funeral, if you're lucky, you might see him in traffic jam. The institution that is Parliament is so, so difficult to access, and yet it's essentially a public building. I mean, you really need to be an insider to know how to access the building or even access the office where your member of Parliament sits. So we got the Deputy Speaker on Twitter as well as the Speaker of Parliament, and we encouraged them, we now do quarterly and maybe, depending on their schedule, once every two months, occasional tweet chats to just talk about things that are happening in government, things that are happening in Parliament, and we spent at least two weeks promoting it so that anyone that's on Twitter or Facebook knows that on such and such a day, this MP is going to be available. And there's a hashtag for anyone to follow questions. So if an MP decides to dodge a question or to sidestep it, there are always ways to remind them, oh, you know, there's this question right here that we think you should respond to. And it has had, this has really been one of our most successful things in the recent past, so much so that the Parliament of Uganda decided to adopt it, decided to take it up as one of their projects. But like I said, our work keeps evolving and evolving from just being the guys that provide information to being the people that provides analysis, to being the people that make MPs more accessible. We're now using more technological tools to get mainstream audiences more involved in parliamentary business. This was a project that we worked on that we named, that we dubbed Make Your Budget. Essentially, what we did was show what the national budget looks like, then we developed a tool, I didn't put the link, then we developed a tool that allows you to go to our website and look and do your own budget. You know, come up with your own budget, give us an idea of if you're in charge of making this budget, what would it look like? And we've had close to 3,000 people within the city participate in this campaign and it has revealed to us some interesting dynamics. For example, we now know that at least most people that use our platform will spend the same amount on security and defense as the government does, which is ironic because there's a lot of public criticism on how much government spends on security and defense. So we think that the work that we are doing has been very key in just debunking some of the narratives that have gone on for a long time but that have gone on for a long time and challenged and also some of the narratives that are false to just help us have more honest discussions on how to conduct business in parliament. So we do a lot, but I'm running out of time. So essentially thank you.