Welcome to Open House

Open House is a Southern African initiative of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) that works with civil society and parliaments across the SADC region to promote openness, transparency and citizen engagement.

From Our Blog

Our Vision

We believe Africa’s parliaments should be true “People’s Parliaments” — open, accountable, and answerable to the people who elected them.

Across SADC’s 16 countries, spanning very different political systems and colonial legacies, we work to build constructive collaboration between civil society and national parliaments, promoting transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement in how decisions get made.

Our Values

Open House is committed to enhancing parliamentary transparency, accountability, and citizen inclusion in parliamentary work across the SADC region in concert with efforts on the continent. We do this by:

Citizen Engagement

Encouraging citizen engagement with their national, subnational and regional parliaments;

Access to information

Promoting access to parliaments and access to information on the work of those parliaments;

Critical self-evaluation

Encouraging critical self-evaluation and collaborative evaluation of Parliament’s fulfilment of its mandate;

Evaluate

Developing tools to evaluate parliamentary performance;

Monitoring

Monitoring parliament for anti-corruption reforms and the exercise of its oversight role in holding the Executive to account;

Peer Learning

And facilitating peer learning among Parliamentary Engagement and Monitoring Organizations (PEMOs) to showcase best practices in parliamentary work and to contribute to the overall progress in transparency and openness among African parliaments.

Our Team

Open House is an initiative of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) born out of nearly three decades of engagement with legislatures and the various stakeholders who care about those legislatures in South Africa. This initiative seeks to foster and strengthen collaboration between civil society and other structures with national parliaments across the SADC region and to build a community promoting best practices around openness and inclusivity. 

We collaborate closely with the Southern African Council of NGOs (SAf-CNGO), the regional umbrella body for national associations of nongovenmental organisations operating in the 16 countries of the SADC region. 

Our Network

We are part of the Africa Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations Network (APMON) which is a continental network of non-governmental organisations and coalitions of civil society organisations that monitor the work of and who regularly engage national, subnational and regional parliaments across Africa.

We are inspired by the founding principles of transparency, accountability and citizen engagement contained in the South African Constitution and which form the bedrock of the open democracy we actively promote. Africa promised herself that by throwing off the yoke of colonialism, its legislatures would also become “People’s Parliaments”. We hope to help make that a reality.

ABOUT SADC

The Southern African Development Community Parliamentary Forum (SADC PF) was established in 1997 in accordance with Article 9 (2) of the SADC Treaty as an autonomous institution of SADC It is a regional inter-parliamentary body composed of fifteen (15) parliaments representing over 3500 parliamentarians in the SADC region.

These member parliaments are Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Country Focus

Our work currently focuses on three countries, with additional countries to be featured as the project develops.

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