When students report problems, schools improve: one problem in three fixed!

With the DevelopmentCheck app, Integrity Action’s tool, students, parents and the community obtained key information on their schools – water and toilets, libraries, number of pupils per class, teachers’ qualifications – as well as on school budgets and spending. The project supported the government’s free primary and secondary education reform by making schools more accountable.

At the Itara Institute, fifteen student monitors have been following their school since February 2018. They alerted the management to overcrowded classrooms, broken desks and only three toilets for 590 students. Thanks to their dialogue with the management, the parents’ committee and teachers, the desks were repaired, three new classrooms were built and a block of eight latrines, with separate toilets for girls, was started.

Between 2017 and 2020, 810 students in 54 Integrity Clubs were trained and helped fix an average of 32% of the problems they reported.

From EduCheck, CERC built three more tools on the same model:

HealthCheck applies the EduCheck approach to health: citizens monitor their health centre – quality of care, medicines, fees and hygiene – and each problem is followed up with the health authorities. GovCheck, developed in 2023, lets citizens document and report irregularities in public projects and follow the budget of a province, city, commune or chiefdom. UNCAC Tracker follows up the DRC’s commitments under the United Nations Convention against Corruption, building on the civil society parallel report CERC produced with the UNCAC Coalition.

All four follow the same principles: reports are checked before they are published, the people who report are never named, and a problem counts as fixed only once it has been checked on site.

Many civil society organisations have a strong field method and no means to digitise it. CERC’s experience shows that with a well-written specification, an AI coding assistant and low-cost hosting, a team without developers can put a citizen monitoring tool online in a few weeks. To share it, CERC is preparing a guide in French and a template repository of a reporting module modelled on EduCheck, to be published as open source, and a hands-on workshop in Kinshasa and Bukavu where participants rebuild such a module in one day, from GitHub repository to deployment.

Civil society organisations can take the model and replace the school with the service they monitor, as HealthCheck did for health centres, using the questions of their own monitoring guides. Governments and public authorities can use the data to act on the problems reported, publish official fees and school and health budgets, and make citizen monitoring a condition of funding for school and health infrastructure. Universities and researchers can analyse the data to understand where and how corruption affects public services.

Organisations and authorities that want to use or adapt the tools can write to heri.bitamala@cerc.cd.

« Thanks to the joint working group meetings held in our school, the whole process has become clearer and more transparent. »

Kahindo Ndjungu, head of ITIP Uvira