The Challenge
Public spending and service delivery have the potential to greatly improve the lives of people around the world. However, without proper monitoring and accountability, inefficiencies or corruption often prevent resources in health, education, and other sectors from reaching the citizens who need them most.
The Opportunity
Independent civil society organizations (CSOs) are increasingly monitoring social sector resources to identify problems with the services and spending and advocate for improvements. This concept of social accountability, while still relatively new, is showing great promise to improve the delivery of health, education, water, and other essential services by involving citizens in holding decision makers to account.
Our Work
Results for Development has been supporting civil society-led social accountability efforts since 2007. Our work includes the following approaches:
- Direct financial and technical support to CSOs undertaking social accountability work, including monitoring absenteeism of teachers and health workers, identifying leakages in spending, seeking feedback from beneficiaries on their experiences with services, and setting up systems for community monitoring of and dialogue around health, education and water services.
- Building evidence and learning about how to better design and implement social accountability activities as well as understanding better the impact they can have on development outcomes.
- Mainstreaming social accountability practices into sector and sub-sector systems, such as family planning.
- Facilitating connections, collaborations, and learning across a wide range of CSOs seeking to scale up social accountability worldwide.
Our Civil Society & Social Accountability Projects
Strengthening Monitoring and Accountability for Family Planning
Transparency & Accountability Program
Building Bridges for Better Spending in Southeast Asia
To learn more about social accountability, click on the following resources:
