Our goal under the Governance Monitoring & Accountability work area is to strengthen the power of people to organise, influence public policies, and hold the government accountable.
It is delivered through three priority intervention areas, namely: Accelerating Access to Information & Budget Literacy, Strengthened Citizens Oversight, and Citizens Action & Campaigns.
Access to Information
Our aim is to strengthen transparency and citizens’ access to, and demand for, public information on policies, standards, budgets/expenditures, targets and performance, and to develop the capacity of citizens to understand and utilise that information.
Transparency, access to information, and open budgets are essential elements of democracy and good governance. Our approach is to: (i) strengthen the supply and dissemination of relevant (government) public information (including budgets), (ii) make public information more accessible, and (iii) build the capacity of citizens to understand the information provided.
We equip citizens with civic (and voter) knowledge and skills to enable them to engage with the democratization process. We hope that improved supply of, and understanding of information can facilitate a constructive dialogue on ways that can trigger improvements in the performance of local service delivery. Our idea is to strengthen both provision of and demand for public information.
Citizens’ Oversight
Our aim is to improve service delivery through actions that strengthen accountability, deepen public participation and oversight and reduce corruption in the public sector.
Our approach is to contribute to actions that strengthen government transparency and accountability through facilitated citizen-led monitoring and reporting of government programs and services and influencing the policy formulation and budgeting process.
Our strategy seeks to strengthen the role of citizens in monitoring and seeking accountability from local leaders and service providers and to report corruption. We purposefully focus on citizen engagement through monitoring and feedback of government performance. Our strategy shifts away from a large, formal mechanism where participation is a government requirement but very passive, and emphasizes monitoring activities at the community level in which citizens participate freely and play active roles. We seek to empower local elected leaders and citizens to reflect on performance compared with standards and to focus on identifying actions that can be taken to improve government performance and service delivery.
On the demand-side, our strategy introduces a facilitated process of participatory monitoring of a range of services/government functions. We empower communities to (i) conduct their own assessment of the performance of local services, (ii) prioritize their greatest concerns, and iii) develop action plans to address them.
On the supply-side, we set out to engage government to support community-led monitoring activities (feedback, results and follow-up). Emphasis is placed on strengthening communication and working relationships between citizens and local authorities.
Citizens’ Action & Campaigns
Our aim is to inspire, organize and work with greater numbers of people, to enable communities to fight corruption as a major social, economic, and political ill that infringes upon people’s rights and retards progress.
Our approach focuses on activating a citizen-led anti-corruption ecosystem/movement to champion the cause for greater government transparency and accountability. Our work focuses on strengthening the demand side of accountability so that poor and marginalized people and communities are able to understand the impact of corruption and take action against it. We aim to build greater citizens’ resistance against corruption and galvanize citizens’ voices and actions.
Our intervention focuses on four main areas: i) providing citizens with the skills and tools to fight corruption, ii) undertaking campaigns that bring people together around specific anti-corruption campaigns, iii) community organising and movement building, and iv) promoting cooperation and learning amongst organisations and communities working on Anti-corruption related interventions.