Dissemination Workshops

As part of my job, we are doing workshops where we present various constituencies throughout the country with the scorecard for their MP (member of parliament). We have these workshops in order to measure the impact of the scorecard on the voters. In these workshops, we present the scorecard and explain what it means. All the scores and grade we give are relative to other MPs, because otherwise i fear that too many would fail :) We also invite the MPs to come to these workshops to defend their actions and explain why they scored the way they did. We had our first workshop on August 21st and there were two MPs for this workshop and both of them came. The reason there were two MPs for this workshop is because there are different types of MPs: one type is the "universal adult suffrage" (UAS) MPs who are voted in as we woudl vote in Senators or Reps. Then there are Women MPs, and each district has a Woman MP, only a woman can hold this position, but all voters, both male and female, vote for them. So, this workshop was for the constituency UAS MP (Honorable Kawuma) and for the District Women MP (Honorable Seninde). And everyone addresses MPs with the titel "Honorable".

Anyway, the reason I tell you this, is because I had to do the methodology and results presentations. I had to explain how we came up with the scores and then what the scores mean. So, I was explaining that "Hon. Seninde got an F in constituency, which means that she performed worse than the average Women MP and the average MP from the Central Region . . ." needless to say, she was not very happy.

Niether of these MPs performed particularly well, but Kawuma was quite respectful and said things like "I will use this scorecard to strengthen my weaknesses" but Seninde was like "How could they give me an F!?!?! AFLI [the organization I work for] has no moral authority to judge me! It is you, the voters to judge!" It got pretty intense, but it was really fun and people seemed to support what we were doing. We are not out on a witch hunt, we are just trying to help the peopel see how their MPs are performing.

After the workshop, I was interveiwed by one of the TV stations and they aired it on TV the next night which was pretty cool.

Here are some pictures:

These are the two MPs (from left to right): Kawuma and Seninde. This is them while I was doing my presentation, she looks like she wants to rip my head off!

This is me presenting the methodology and results; behind me is our last minute way to post the large copies of the scorecard :) yeah, we were not that organized :)

Here I am using the make-shift pointer, and yes everyone laughed when I pulled it out to use :)


And here is Hon. Kawuma responding to his results


And here is Hon. seninde cussing AFLI and me out for giving her a bad score . . . if you want a better score then do your flippin job!


And here is a picture of past of the audience; we had about 160 peopel come, which was really cool.