Africa i-Parliaments

Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan is an Africa-wide initiative to empower African Parliaments to better fulfill their democratic functions by supporting their efforts to become open, participatory, knowledge-based and learning organisations, implemented by the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UN/DESA).

It builds on the experiences, lessons learned, and tools and applications developed during the implementation of the initiative “Strengthening Parliaments’ Information Systems in Africa” and focus its activities on the following regional initiatives:

• Bungeni Parliamentary and Legislative Information System www.bungeni.org : a suite of open source applications meant to improve the efficiency and efficacy of Parliamentary processes and systems and reduce the cost and time of information dissemination by allowing efficient creation, management and publishing of parliamentary documents in different formats and on different media.
  
  
• Akoma Ntoso www.akomantoso.org : a set of simple, technology-neutral XML machine-readable descriptions of parliamentary, legislative and judiciary documents that makes the structural and semantic components of digital parliamentary documents accessible supporting the creation of high-value parliamentary and legislative information services that greatly improve efficiency and accountability in the parliamentary institutions.
  
  
• Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network (APKN) www.apkn.org : a parliamentary network meant to support capacity building activities, common services, sharing of experiences and best practices among African parliaments. It was established in June 2008 under the aegis of the Pan African Parliament. In October 2010, the 1st APKN Council of Coordinators and Plenary was convened and elected the new Executive Committee chaired by the Parliament of South Africa.