Through our experience in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Ukraine, we have developed a proven approach to strengthening social accountability mechanisms for improved service delivery. Social accountability empowers citizens to hold service providers and local governments accountable. By facilitating dialogue and feedback between service users and providers, we help create joint action plans to enhance service quality and accessibility. We use tools such as Citizen’s Scorecards, Community Report Cards, and Participatory Budgeting, and have digitised the social accountability process with mobile technology for data collection, BI dashboards and exchange platforms. This modern approach streamlines communication and fosters greater transparency and responsiveness in service delivery.
Our flagship project, the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program (ESAP), has used the following approach. For over ten years, the Ethiopia Social Accountability Programme has worked towards improving service provision in local governments in Ethiopia through Social Accountability (SA), defined as the process to build trust between civil society, citizen and the government in participative planning and budgeting of local service delivery. ESAP’s programmatic features are designed to produce supply-side and demand-side change, both independently and interactively.
The programme builds on existing woreda-level institutions and citizen representative organizations, such as the woreda council, administration and sector offices, the Financial Transparency and Accountability program (FTA), traditional citizen-representing organizations, representative organizations of minority groups and other Community Based Organizations (CBOs). Woreda Social Accountability Committees (WSACs) also constitute the backbone of the program, and currently, 410 WSACs with 5,086 (1, 803 female) members, are leading the SA process.
The programme is implemented based on social accountability (SA) cycle, which consists of five distinct but interrelated steps that are intended to facilitate a conscious, deliberate, and collaborative engagement process between citizens and service providers for improved delivery.