Parliamentary Network Africa’s Gambia Country Program and its partners in The Gambia officially launched the Network of Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations, The Gambia (NEPMOG) in 2023.

The launch was held at The Gambia National Assembly Auditorium under the theme, “Improving Partnerships and Collaboration between the National Assembly and Civil Society.” PNAfrica made its first physical presence in The Gambia in the year 2021, with the organization of its first workshop for Civil Society Organizations under the Open Parliament Engagements and Networking in West Africa (OPEN West Africa) project, and it continues to strive to make an impact to nurture the budding relationship between CSOs and the National Assembly.

NEPMOG is one of the 10 networks of PMOs that were created under the Open West Africa Project. The rest are Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Togo, Niger, Nigeria, and Ghana. In a presentation by PNAfrica’s Gambia Country Manager, Mr. Gilbert Boyefio reiterated that The OPEN West Africa Project had two main objectives including the need: To facilitate networking among parliamentary monitoring organizations (PMOs) in West Africa for experience sharing and collaborative dialogue; and the need to strengthen parliamentary openness across national and regional legislatures in West Africa through a legislative transparency tool.

Launch of Gambia’s Network of Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations (NEPMOG) He expressed the hope that the Gambia Assembly will come tops in the next edition of the Open Parliament Index (OPI), after the successful implementation of its country programmes.

“We expect that through the successful implementation of these projects, in collaboration with the Network and the National Assembly, the next index assessment will see the Gambia National Assembly performing much better than previously”, said the Gambia Country Chief for PNAfrica, Gilbert Borketey Boyefio..