Not In My Country launched in Kenya last month and is hoping to appeal to people’s sense of patriotism as they look to highlight and tackle corruption and poor academic teaching in the country.
The site was originally set up in Uganda by an international group of concerned citizens, who choose to remain anonymous, tired of seeing seven out of 10 countries in the world suffer from corruption.
It has now launched a dedicated Kenya section of the website.
Speaking to HumanIPO, one of the founders said: “By saying ‘Not In My Country’ we hope to appeal to people’s sense of patriotism, but at the same time because we don’t name the country it means the slogan can extend to any country. Thus when we expanded from Uganda to Kenya the name didn’t change.”
Through the website, students can anonymously and securely rate the performance of their lectures and their administrators.
They can also report corruption committed by individuals in the university and view or participate in academic staff and department ranking.
“The motivation for its adoption in the country was the extent of frustration experienced by students at the hands of corrupt and ill-mannered university personnel.” one of the founders said.
The founders say that the creation of the Kenya chapter of notinmycountry.org was inspired by a statement made by former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton when she visited Kenya in 2009.
Clinton said speaking at a conference in Nairobi: “I think there’s an opportunity for young people and for civil society to use modern technology to run corruption watches and reporting. Young people should use interactive media to report real-time allegations of corruption.”
According the website administrators, if the students are empowered to hold abusers to account, there will be a positive impact across the country for years to come.
The challenge facing the website founders is to obtain the images of university staff to place against their names for ease of identification.
