Giving people a voice
We have made a commitment to scale up our work on empowerment and accountability. By 2015 we will support 40 million people to have choice and control over their own development and to hold decision-makers to account.
To support this commitment, each DFID country office which provides aid directly to government will spend up to 5% of the total on support to domestic accountability, with flexibility to respond to individual country circumstances. This could be done through support to local organisations such as service user groups to provide direct feedback on services such as education or health, or media to scrutinise government performance against commitments.
Increasingly, new technologies such as mobile phones can be used to support this work and provide easier access to information about services and budgets to citizens so that they are better informed. DFID also supports local organisations to develop skills, such as ability to understand and use information, so that they are better able to monitor services and hold officials to account.
Removing barriers
Work on empowerment and accountability also addresses the barriers that prevent poor people from accessing services and benefitting from resources which they could use to lift themselves out of poverty. These barriers include laws that prevent women and girls from inheriting and owning property, requirements for identity papers in order to access services such as clinics and schools or lack of information about how to vote in local and national elections.
Understanding and addressing power and political processes is central to addressing these barriers. Work on empowerment and accountability may involve identifying grass roots organisations, "champions of change", and potential partners that can help to build bridges between poor people, officials and political representatives and ensure that national and local governments respond to the concerns of the poor.
Partnerships
We invest in a range of partnerships at both headquarters and country level that support empowerment and accountability. For example:
- The Transparency and Accountability Initiative (TAI), which we co-chair with the Open Society Foundation. TAI brings together governments and non-government partners to promote increased transparency and accountability.
- The Open Government Partnership, which promotes improvements in areas such as budget transparency, access to information, asset declaration and citizen engagements. Progress in these areas will enable citizens to hold their governments to account more easily and more effectively. DFID has committed to use these open government principles as part of our assessments when providing financial aid direct to governments.
- Twaweza in East Africa, which helps people to make change happen in their own communities and hold government to account, including through mass media and mobile phone networks. For example, DFID is supporting Twaweza to carry out community level monitoring of children’s literacy and numeracy. Simple test results are sent by SMS from all over the country and are widely publicised.
- ’Ushahidi’, a Kenyan website that was initially developed to map reports of violence after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. It uses crowd sourcing to gets information from a large number of people, to help in planning where resources go and in monitoring service delivery. 45,000 people have used it to submit reports via the web and mobile phone.
- DFID Rwanda supports 14 Rwandan civil society organisations through the Civil Society Capacity Building and Engagement in Public Policy Information, Monitoring and Advocacy (PPIMA) project. This project, aims to promote citizens engagement in and influence on national and local level policies and plans for poverty reduction. The project is rolling out new approaches to community monitoring of service delivery, such as a community score cards, which are being implemented in 128 villages in 2011.