Citizen Rights to Access Public Information & Personal Data Privacy

In early summer, PSYDEH was selected by the Instituto Nacional de Transparencia, Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos Personales (INAI) to be one of 22 Mexican NGOs across the Republic producing projects to promote knowledge and activism around the General Law of Transparency and Access to Public Information.

This education, skill-building and civil society strengthening project is organized loosely around the Paulo Freire model of popular education and with particular sensitivity to gender and humanistic psychology realities.

The initiative kicks into high gear in the Fall of 2018 and produces five strategic actions:

1. COMMUNITY WORKSHOPS through which PSYDEH develops indigenous women’s skills, capacities, and knowledge.
2. MUNICIPAL FORUMS during which we give information to local officials on how they can provide better public services.
3. COMMUNITY MEETINGS at which we analyze and discuss these rights with people in more than 20 communities.
4. RADIO SPOTS through which we broadcast information about these rights in the public squares in the region’s three mother tongues—Náhuatl, Otomí, and Tepehua.
5. 300 SPECIFIC REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION from municipal, state, and national government using the national platform of transparency, 100 of which are written in the local languages Otomí, Náhuatl and Tepehua.

This project gives PSYDEH another great opportunity to use its scalable program model to strengthen its partner network of NGOs and their indigenous women leaders.

As Damon Taylor, PSYDEH’s Senior Advisor states, “By co-leading our INAI work, women partners are supported and seen as change-making actors in a region where they confront significant political, gender and other forms of violence and discrimination.”