Part One: The Morning Chaos
On a beautiful December morning in 2020, I woke up full of energy. My day was neatly planned, as I always do. I love mornings. Every new day feels like a chance to make a dent in the world. Like I wrote in my book Rated PG for Personal Growth, co-authored with my friend Jeremy Byemanzi, I live by to-do lists. I prepare them the night before because only what is measured gets done. That morning’s list was ready, my energy was high, and the day felt full of promise.
I headed to the bathroom. Now, let me confess: I have a special relationship with water. While most people just walk under the shower and turn the tap, I prepare. First, I soap myself thoroughly from head to toe, sponge in hand, until I am a walking lather factory. Only then do I tiptoe toward the showerhead, bracing for the grand splash!
Except that day, when I turned the tap, nothing came out. Not a drop.
At first, I thought I had twisted it the wrong way. So I spun it back. Still nothing. Meanwhile, I was covered in soap, eyes squeezed half-shut, shuffling across the slippery tiles like a penguin. Somewhere between panic and comedy, I stumbled to the kitchen, praying for a miracle.
And there it was, a jerrycan of water. My savior. I grabbed it, sliding dangerously on the soapy floor, and managed to rinse off. But my smooth morning was already ruined.
“Ah, these National Water guys,” I muttered. “They really need to fix this problem.” I assumed it was temporary. By evening, it would be sorted. It was not.
Part Two: The Jerrycan Act
Days turned into weeks. My family became reluctant water economists, rationing every drop. I filed reports, called friends at the National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC), and even tweeted. Still, the taps stayed dry.
When my friend Jon, who worked there, offered yet another long lecture about future government projects, I asked simply, “Jon, will there be water today?”. Silence.
That was when I realized that I was being managed, not helped. You see, Jon wasn’t my friend, but rather a spokesperson of the NWSC. And how do I get to know him? After many attempts to resolve water issues in the suburbs I lived in I would try as much as possible to get to as many people as possible. Even in this instance, I engaged everyone I could until I had to speak to Jon.
So one morning, I decided enough was enough! Complaints had reached their limit. Calls and tweets had dried up, just like the taps. It was time for action. I came up with a plan that was bold, maybe even reckless. I would carry my jerrycans straight to the NWSC office in Kasangati and demand water right there.
I started small, collecting every container in my house. Then I raided nearby shops for more. And here is where I got stuck, the color. In Uganda, most jerrycans are bright yellow. And yellow happens to be the color of the ruling party. Imagine me showing up at a government office with a mountain of yellow jerrycans. It would look like a political rally. I did not want that. So I searched high and low for other colors, until finally I had a rainbow of containers stacked into my Pajero like a delivery truck.
I reversed into the compound of the NWSC office. Beep. Beep. Beep. The sound of the car reversing must have turned a few heads.
Then I stepped out, two jerrycans in each hand, and began unloading. Slowly. Calmly. Into their lobby.
Inside, my heart was racing. What if they arrested me? What if I was charged with trespassing? What if this whole thing backfired? But I kept moving, back and forth, piling up plastic towers of protest.
The receptionist rushed toward me, alarmed. "What do you think you are doing?" she barked. If you have lived in Uganda, you know that line. It is the same one traffic police use when they pull you over.
I did not answer. I just kept working. What she did not know was that I had already gone live on Facebook. My phone, tucked carefully, was streaming every step to anyone who cared to watch. Slowly, the views ticked up. Messages started pinging on their phones: "You are live. That man is at your office."
Then I asked to see the manager. She appeared, nervous, trying to figure out how to handle this situation. I explained calmly: "I have made calls. I have sent reports. I have tweeted. But my family has no water. People in the village have no water. I have come here for water." She hesitated, then said, "We also do not have water."
But I had already spotted a tap behind the office. I walked over, and sure enough, there was water. Only the nozzle had been unscrewed so no one could use it. That is when I lost patience. "Do not lie to me," I said. "If there is water here, then give it to me and ensure the entire village has water just like you do here."
Long story short, they gave me water. And by evening, the many people in town knew what I had done. The media had picked up the story of the man with the jerrycans. My phone would not stop ringing.
The next morning, on my way to work, I saw something I had not seen in months. Trucks, workers, pipes. They were digging trenches and laying new lines to fix the water crisis. Today, that area rarely experiences the long outages we once endured.
One man. A pile of jerrycans. And suddenly, the taps began to flow again. Of course, plus inspiration for others!
Part Three: Reflection and Agency
One would wonder, where this boldness came from. You see, I grew up in a home where I could engage my parents and sometimes push back on things I felt were unfair. To their credit, they listened and often acted. At school, as a student leader, I learned to raise issues on behalf of others and to engage school authorities. Later, at university, I encountered the work of Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire and his idea of conscientization in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Simply put, conscientization means realizing that your struggles are not just private they are tied to larger systems. Once you see that, you face a choice: accept silence or act. Freire called this blend of reflection and action praxis.
Carrying those jerrycans wasn’t a protest. It was an act of agency a practical, responsible response to a public problem. In that moment, reflection became action. And that, to me, is what active citizenship should look like.
Citizenship is not only about voting every five years. It is about participation, sharing ideas, asking questions, holding institutions accountable, and respecting the rights of others. When citizens stay quiet, institutions grow comfortable and sometimes may not know know what the people they serve or experiencing so that they come up with solutions. But when citizens act, systems shift sometimes in ways no one expects, especially when those in positions of responsibility have the humility to listen or when listening is the safest choice.
This same belief has guided the work of Evidence and Methods Lab - helping citizens understand the systems that shape their lives and find constructive ways to respond. We began by asking a simple question: how do you make information usable to someone who has never seen themselves in the data? That question inspired our work simplifying the Constitution into accessible formats and visualizing national budgets in ways that made trade-offs visible at a glance. These efforts weren’t just about presentation; they were about nurturing the discipline of critical thinking helping citizens define problems clearly, weigh evidence, compare what was promised with what was delivered, and decide how to engage.
But understanding is only part of empowerment. People also need ways to express what they see and feel, and having their voices curated.
That’s why much of our storytelling work has focused on giving shape and voice to citizen experience. We turned complex public data into short, shareable visuals that ordinary people could discuss without expert translation.
We have experimented with creative approaches like short videos that used irony and reverse psychology to provoke reflection, and comic strips that reimagined civic ideas through humor and empathy. These were not entertainment; they were bridges or ways to make public conversations less intimidating and more thoughtful, to help people test their opinions, laugh at their frustrations, and see that critical reflection can be a civic act in itself.
And when people find their voice, the next challenge is ensuring that voice meets a willing ear. Our convening work has therefore focused on bringing citizens, researchers, and public officials into spaces designed for dialogue rather than debate spaces where evidence and lived experience can coexist. Through policy dialogues, civic-tech innovation, and action research, we have explored how communities can use technology to improve transparency and responsiveness in everyday governance. Across these experiences, we’ve learned that real progress is not measured by the number of tools or reports produced, but by the quality of public reasoning that emerges, by how people begin to ask sharper questions, make clearer requests, and insist, calmly and persistently, on being heard.
That, ultimately, is what we mean by agency: informed judgment, collective voice, and the courage to act with both reason and empathy.
Over the past decade, EML’s work has reached more than five million citizens across Uganda with partnerships that have helped us deliver work in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Malawi, Botswana, Liberia, Mauritius, Sierra Leone, etc.
From simplifying national budgets to visualizing court processes, from building civic tech tools to advancing gender equality and climate accountability, our work has connected evidence to everyday life.
We’ve implemented projects supported by institutions based in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands etc, through organizations such as the British High Commission, GIZ, and The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL), ActionAid and local institutions or clients like the Office of the Auditor General, Makerere University, National Planning Authority, Local Governments - for our grassroots reach etc. alongside global collaborators including the Ford Foundation, Oxfam, World Bank, Internet Society Foundation among others. These relationships demonstrate global trust in locally grounded innovation and how we see change.
EML team members hold community engagement activities in a rural district in Uganda.
Part Four: From Challenge to Change - Why #WeShapeGov Matters
That experience trying to fix the water problem reminded me that silence has a cost. I wondered what if I had kept quiet like many other people in the village while we lived with the problem for weeks, waiting for some miracle, for a change of hearts by the NWSC staff to care enough about the problem and take action without being reminded in an extraordinary way. The problem was solved when I broke the silence.
You see, across Uganda and much of Africa, despite efforts by organisations like ours, data still shows citizens are aware of issues but rarely engage directly with decision-makers. When citizens cannot express themselves or meaningfully engage, governments lose the insight and legitimacy needed to respond effectively. The result is a widening gap between the governed and those who govern - a silent divide that erodes public confidence, weakens institutions, and leaves citizens feeling unseen.
Across Africa and the Global South, citizens remain spoken for rather than heard from. According to a 2023 Afrobarometer survey, only 46 percent of Africans feel free to express political opinions publicly, and fewer than three in ten believe that government leaders listen to ordinary people between elections. This sense of disconnection is not unique to Africa. A Pew Research Center 2025 survey found that 46 percent of citizens globally say few or none of their leaders understand people like them a reminder that the crisis of voice and representation is global. Meanwhile, reports show that over half of Africans are still offline, effectively excluded from the digital spaces where much of today’s civic participation and accountability take place.
These realities reveal a deep crisis of civic trust. Governance systems across many countries lack empathy and authentic feedback from the communities most affected by public decisions. They also explain why citizen agency not just access to information is essential. Information without action is awareness without power.
That’s why, we believe in turning reflection into response and why our evolving Theory of Change places people at the center: When citizens have clear information, safe spaces to engage, and tools to act, they hold institutions accountable or provide constructive feedback, respectfully, and systems respond. This approach will continue to shape our work going forward.
Through our new programme, #WeShapeGov, we are aiming to scale our impact further bringing together all our initiatives under one shared vision of People, Participation, and Response. We will provide tools for engagement, curate data and make evidence accessible to citizens and policymakers, curate stories that stimulate dialogue as well build capacity of institutions and individuals who enable this work.
We will still maintain our attempt to make impact across diverse sectors with specific attention to accountability and anti-corruption (with renewed attention to strengthened citizen-state interaction, and less combative methods), human rights, conflict and violence prevention and climate change, in alignment with the respective Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 16, 5 and 13.
Over the next two years, through #WeShapeGov we have the ambition to operate in at least eight countries prioritizing Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Malawi, Egypt, Botswana and potentially, India. The programme houses two flagship initiatives: Citizen Letters, which collects handwritten letters from citizens and digitizes them for leaders to read and act upon, and Faayo, an AI enabled civic‑tech platform that captures real‑time feedback on public services and tracks responses.
Together they create a citizen feedback ecosystem that connects human stories and service data and that elevates participation for people with and without digital access. Our goal is to collect 80,000 Citizen Letters and digital submissions, engage 1,000 leaders and institutions, and train 500 volunteers to champion community feedback and dialogue.
Anticipated to cost at least USD 1.15 million which we are currently mobilizing from potential partners, this phase builds on our record of making complex information accessible and participatory. It reimagines citizen engagement not as confrontation but as collaboration between institutions and people — analog and digital, local and global.
Part Five: The Call to Agency
When I carried those jerrycans to the NWSC office, I did not intend to start a campaign, and no effort do I consider myself a hero. I just wanted water. But that act reminded me of something profound:
One citizen, acting with intention, can open the taps for an entire community. Imagine what could happen if entire communities engaged meaningfully with institutions that hold power — deliver services?
#WeShapeGov exists to inspire, multiply and accelerate that possibility to make sure no one has to carry jerrycans just to be heard again. We are seeking to answer the question: How do we make it easier for citizens to take dignified, constructive action and for institutions to listen and respond?
Our answer is not to idealize confrontation, but to design everyday tools for engagement. We want citizens to act before frustration turns into silence or unnecessary public pressure, and leaders to respond before trust is lost.
That is what #WeShapeGov seeks to make possible.
Here’s how you can join the journey:
💌 Provide feedback: Utilize Faayo to provide your assessment of service received at a public institute like a police station, health centre, court, water point, etc. Write a Letter through Citizen Letters (when the digital platform becomes available in your country). Share your feedback: question or concern to a public official, submit the letter to the leader and share a copy with us. Every letter helps leaders see citizens as people, not numbers.
📱 Volunteer: Become a Citizen Champion under #WeShapeGov. Help collect letters, stories, and feedback across communities. Apply here 👉 https://shorturl.at/Vc7TS
🤝 Collaborate or Support. If your organization believes in a process that prioritizes citizen agency and meaningful interaction between citizens and authorities to improve service delivery across various sectors, please join us to fund this initiative.
Email: hello@evidenceandmethodslab.org to directly reach an EML staff member.
Click here to donate directly: https://evidenceandmethodslab.org/contact
To learn more about our work visit: www.evidenceandmethodslab.org
#WeShapeGov #CitizenLetters #Faayo #LeaderResponseIndex #Insights #Feedback #Governance
#CitizenAgency #CivicTech #Accountability #Africa
