Last week in Dar es Salaam, R4D’s Governance Team facilitated a Transparency and Accountability Program (TAP) workshop on Citizen Report Cards to kick off the next year’s work with fifteen organizations from seven African countries.

The fifteen participating organizations consist of five participants currently in the second of a three year term and ten participants just beginning a one year term with TAP. Over the next year, all participants will adapt and implement Citizen Report Cards, a tool for citizen participation in governance that emphasizes the user experience when it comes to accessing public services.

The Citizen Report Card is a method for building performance feedback loops for civil servants and public sector professionals. Developed by the Public Affairs Centre (PAC), a Bangalore-based not-for-profit organization established in 1994 with a mandate to improve the quality of governance in India, the Citizen Report Card “generates credible user feedback using sound research methods,” and has helped improve a range of public services in a number of cities in India. The PAC-affiliated Public Affairs Foundation, a for-profit organization, was established to help share PAC-developed tools such as the Citizen Report Card. The Public Affairs Foundation’s Sita Sekhar and T.S. Prasad walked research staff from TAP participants through the Citizen Report Card process.

R4D’s Governance Team – consisting of Senior Program Associate Courtney Heck, Program Officer Caroline Poirrier, Program Director Courtney Tolmie, and Managing Director Nicholas Burnett – facilitated a number of peer review sessions, a key component of the TAP program. Three-year participants presented progress reports from the previous year's work using Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys and Quantitative Service Delivery Surveys, meanwhile one-year participants reviewed each other’s organizational goals and research questions.

In the second half of the workshop, Megan Lloyd-Laney and Farai Samhungu from Comms Consult guided advocacy/communications staff from three-year participants through a series of exercises designed to highlight important questions and challenges for working with research staff to communicate findings convincingly to key stakeholders.

R4D posted live updates throughout the workshop, via Tumblr: http://unlockingsolutions.tumblr.com/tagged/TAP-in-Dar-2012.

For more about TAP and the workshop, visit the TAP website: http://tap.resultsfordevelopment.org.