Major findings from the five-year Making All Voices Count (MAVC) programme highlighted in its final report Appropriating Technology for Accountability: Lessons from Making All Voices Count suggest that the impact of technologies on improving accountability and government responsiveness as as well citizen empowerment has been mixed.

1. Appropriating technology for accountability
Lessons from
Making All Voices Count
(MAVC)

2. Lesson 1:
Not all voices can be expressed
via technologies.

3. Lesson 2:
Technologies can play decisive
roles in improving services
where the problem is a lack of
planning data or user feedback.

4. Lesson 3:
Common design flaws in tech-
for-governance initiatives often
limit their effectiveness or their
governance outcomes.

5. Lesson 4:
Transparency, information or
open data are not sufficient to
generate accountability.

6. Lesson 5:
Technologies can support social
mobilisation and collective
action by connecting citizens.

7. Lesson 6:
Technologies can create new
spaces for engagement
between citizen and state.

8. Lesson 7:
Technologies can help to
empower citizens and
strengthen their agency for
engagement.

9. Lesson 8:
The kinds of democratic
deliberation needed to
challenge a systemic lack of
accountability are rarely well-
supported by technologies.

10. Lesson 9:
Technologies alone don’t foster
the trusting relationships
needed between governments
and citizens and within each
group of actors.

11. Lesson 10:
The capacities needed to
transform governance
relationships are developed
offline and in social and political
processes rather than by
technologies.

12. Lesson 11:
Technologies can’t overturn the
social norms that underpin
many accountability gaps and
silence some voices.

13. Lesson 12:
A deepening digital divide risks
compounding existing
exclusions.

14. Lesson 13:
New technologies expand
possibilities for surveillance,
repression, and the
manufacturing of consent.

15. Lesson 14:
Uncritical attitudes towards new
technologies, data and the
online risk narrowing the frame
of necessary debates about
accountable governance.