Supporting Local Governance Programme through Comic Work Using the Character of ‘Qasim the Nazim’

Support to Local Governance (LoGo) programme is aimed at strengthening the local government structures and dialogue-based systems of service delivery to meet the citizens' needs in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab. The programme provides advisory services in the four interlinked areas of strengthening local governance, increasing local revenue generation, enhancing state-citizen dialogue and enabling private sector support towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). LoGo is implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and co-financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

Center has been working with the LoGo Programme’s result area State-Citizen Dialogue for development and implementation of a Communication for Development (C4D) Campaign to support citizen’s voices, rights and responsibilities in Pakistan. As part of this assistance, Center has developed a comic character named “Qasim the Nazim” to be the carrier of messages to citizens and counterparts. The character was developed through a participatory approach based on human centred design and has inputs from partners in Punjab and KP. The character is now given various platforms and narratives to communicate with audiences. The character is also promoted as a vehicle for other projects and interventions around citizen participation in development.

Under this initiative, Center is working with the LoGo Programme's result-area Strengthening Local Governance for developing a different pieces of comic work, using the character of Qasim the Nazim, to improve knowledge of elected local representative and government officials on dialogue-based systems of service delivery to meet the citizens' needs.