Citizens' eyes and voices on budgets and services

In Right2Grow, partners implement two social accountability methodologies that go hand in hand: Citizen Voice and Action (CVA) and Budget Monitoring and Expenditure Tracking (BMET). Through both methodologies, CSOs and CBOs will learn different skills and be trained on various tools to hold local and national authorities accountable for their commitments through monitoring of progress, engaging in dialogue, and demanding transparency in budget planning and management.

Impact on policies

This capacity strengthening will support CSOs in their advocacy initiatives aimed at different levels of government. As part of the CVA and BMET processes, action teams will be formed that implement advocacy activities. Both community level and national efforts will be employed to achieve overarching impact on policy development and implementation.

Engagement

World Vision’s CVA approach is designed to improve the relationship between communities and government, in order to improve services that impact the daily lives of children and their families. CVA is broadly defined as an approach that promotes engagement between citizens and government.

Participatory processes

It has three implementation phases. The first phase, enabling citizen engagement, strengthens the capacity of citizens to engage in governance issues and provides the foundation for subsequent CVA monitoring and advocacy phases. It involves awareness raising on the meaning of citizenship, accountability, good governance and human rights. The second phase, engagement via community gathering, exists of a series of linked participatory processes that focus on assessing the quality of public services (like health care and WASH) and identifying ways to improve their delivery.

Increased wellbeing

In the third phase, improving services and influencing policy, communities begin to implement the action plan that they created as a result of the community gathering process that will allow them to change the condition of the services upon which they depend in their daily lives. Citizens and other stakeholders act together to influence policy at both local and higher levels. As a result, communities have seen marked improvements in services, leading to an increased wellbeing.

Citizens and other stakeholders act together to influence policy at both local and higher levels

Engaged communities

CEGAA’s BMET approach focuses on public budgets and spending on specific local community services. It starts with situational analysis and capacity needs assessments to determine the community service delivery needs and capacity development needs of CSOs, CBOs, researchers, government officials, and media personnel on BMET related topics. Then, necessary skills including budget and expenditure analyses are strengthened among target stakeholders. Communities are then fully engaged in the planning and implementation of research and advocacy activities that follow.

Advocacy campaigns

Based on the findings of the budget and expenditure analyses and community research, strategic advocacy activities are developed and implemented jointly between all stakeholders who work together to form an advocacy Action Team. This team drives the advocacy actions and all desired changes. Relevant advocacy campaigns are developed and implemented tactically, including lobbying, submissions to parliament, media releases and high-level policy meetings.

More information: Citizen Voice Action and Budget Monitoring and Expenditure Tracking (Practitioner book and case study)