The advent of multiparty democracy in much of Sub Saharan Africa during the 1990’s brought with it many developments, some of which have led to an opening for more civic participation in governance. Modeled on the basic tenets of democracy, there was a parallel growth in the number of civil society organizations calling for greater transparency and accountability from government officials. For the first time ever, citizens began to understand that they can make demands from their elected public servants. For instance, in Zambia, South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, etc, people realised another measure of freedom by voting for officials into parliaments and municipal councils. It appears, therefore, that the era of multiparty democracy has ignited the people's desire to start demanding transparency and accountability from those they elected. The transparency movement in those years utilised several platforms at the national and local levels, including the traditional media. But with the coming of and growing access to Information and Communication Technology tools, they extended their use to such tools as the Internet and mobile phones. It is interesting to note that generally most transparency projects stem from the civil society as they traditionally assume the role of a watchdog. Some are global while others are localised. For instance Transparency International, Amnesty International, advocacy and lobbying groups have tended to be in the lead in undertaking projects that call for government’s transparency and accountability. With the new media tools on the rise, people in Sub-Saharan Africa started turning to the web 2.0 tools in the early 2000 to put pressure on their government. For instance in 2001, Kubatana.net in Zimbabwe started in a humble manner to connect non-governmental organisations using their email directory and mailing list. In 2003, Malawi's Sustainable Development Networking Project (SDNP) began as an ISP which mostly provided services to the Malawian government of Malawi, but also ran a conversational forum for civil society organisations. The use of portals and blogs, however, did not begin to take off in Sub-Saharan Africa until mid-2005. It should be understood that there are multiple challenges in the region facing technology for transparency projects. Among these are: poor Internet infrastructure, technophobia, high connection and connectivity costs, the lack of ICT policy in some countries, inadequate knowledge and ICT personnel. These challenges characterise most of new media situations in Sub Saharan Africa. A project called Ujima that attempts to bring transparency to the workings and spending of African governments, multinational non-governmental organizations and business enterprise in African countries says that “few African countries have freedom of information laws. Getting at this information from inside the countries can be difficult.” The Africa i-Parliament Action Plan points out there is a lack of economic and technical resources across the continent. “Many parliaments have a weak IT department, and they do not have the capacity to design and manage the deployment of a complex parliamentary system. Most parliaments are using old systems that are the results of layers of development that are hard to maintain in isolation.” In addition to the above, there is a lack of funding and well trained personnel to creatively keep the transparency battle afloat. Policies and government structures are changing quickly and activists need to adjust accordingly with foresight in order to introduce more transparency and accountability into the system. A visit to several websites run by civil society organizations involved in transparency, civic engagement and election issues reveals frequent lapses in updating the content of the sites, which is linked to inadequate funds and the shortage of personnel. Transparency initiatives have borne fruit at various levels. For instance in Zimbabwe non-governmental organisations put pressure on the government to explain the use of the money that is collected at newly established toll booths. Bev Clark of Kubatana.net explains they put an activist message in one of “the newsletters and asked where the money is going. The conditions of the roads in Bulawayo, Mutare, and Harare are very poor. We put this note in the newsletter to get people to think about and we asked the people to write Transparency International Zimbabwe to do something about it.