Everyone's Blog Posts - Beads - Passion for Facilitation2024-03-29T07:53:51Zhttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profiles/blog/feed?xn_auth=noTheatre for democracy and peacetag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2022-04-27:6394996:BlogPost:838282022-04-27T19:03:47.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><em>I originally wrote this in Dutch on the occasion of the retirement of Peter Knip - Director of VNG international who dedicated his life to democracy and peace.</em></p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10444074654?profile=original" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10444074654?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="350"></img></a> We had found a great way to encourage people in Ethiopia to become active citizens at the helm of democracy. The 'theatre for social accountability' struck a cord with people,…</p>
<p><em>I originally wrote this in Dutch on the occasion of the retirement of Peter Knip - Director of VNG international who dedicated his life to democracy and peace.</em></p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10444074654?profile=original" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10444074654?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="350" class="align-right"/></a>We had found a great way to encourage people in Ethiopia to become active citizens at the helm of democracy. The 'theatre for social accountability' struck a cord with people, their elected representatives and service providers. It showed that the time had come for people from all walks of life to get involved in local democracy. It showed the democratic steps that elected representatives, doctors, school headmasters, agricultural extension officers, and water and road engineers must take to make services and infrastructure accessible to all.</p>
<p>After 7 years, it was considered that our approach could play a role in preventing ethnic conflicts that threatened to get out of hand. It was my last intervention for VNG in Ethiopia. A full house of citizens, local and regional governments from all corners of the country to discuss whether the ESAP principles of democratic dialogue and joint action could be used for conflict management. I remember what Bogye, a female NGO leader who died shortly afterwards, said to me at the end of the day: <em>"every time you make it possible for us to discuss taboo subjects."</em> My best compliment ever!</p>
<p></p>Trust drives a citizen power storm - the Global Assemblytag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2022-02-14:6394996:BlogPost:838152022-02-14T17:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p>Imagine. You are walking to the shop in your village and the local community organizer approaches you. Would you like to participate in a climate assembly with 100 people from around the world for several weeks? This happened in October 2021.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://globalassembly.org/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Global Assembly</a> is not a one-off input for the COP26, but aims to give citizens from around the world a permanent seat at the table of international decision making.…</p>
<p>Imagine. You are walking to the shop in your village and the local community organizer approaches you. Would you like to participate in a climate assembly with 100 people from around the world for several weeks? This happened in October 2021.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://globalassembly.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Global Assembly</a> is not a one-off input for the COP26, but aims to give citizens from around the world a permanent seat at the table of international decision making. This process is guided by the following values:</p>
<ol>
<li><p dir="ltr"><strong>We build new decision-making infrastructure</strong><span> </span>- We believe that people need to have a seat at the global governance table. We are establishing a new decision-making body that activates and involves as many people as possible in defining and addressing the challenges we face.</p>
</li>
<li><p dir="ltr"><strong>We trust in people</strong><span> </span>- We believe that our common global challenges require collective global solutions. When people can access the tools to meet, connect and come up with solutions together, they can and they do.</p>
</li>
<li><strong>We build empathy between people</strong><span> </span>- We believe that we make better decisions when we understand each other. When people communicate at a fundamental level beyond opinions and debate we can overcome polarisation and division and create mutual respect.</li>
<li><strong>We focus on the means, not the ends</strong><span> </span>- We believe the most urgent challenge we face is not to propose solutions, but to come up with better ways of generating solutions together. We seek never to impose our own views, but create a platform for people to think, talk, listen, co-create and act together.</li>
<li><strong>We recognize our biases</strong><span> </span>- We believe that our values, experiences, contexts and identities influence our behaviours and perceptions and it is by actively surfacing and recognizing them that we can best serve others.</li>
<li><strong>We emphasize learning in practice</strong><span> </span>- We believe that we don’t have all the answers, so we share all our findings and mistakes so that we can learn together.</li>
<li><strong>We are open</strong><span> </span>- We believe in making available all our documentation, data, source code, methods, and materials.</li>
<li><strong>We<span> </span></strong><strong>are indepe</strong><strong>ndent</strong><span> </span>- We seek to understand and engage with existing power structures, while maintaining complete independence from them. Governments, funders and institutions have absolutely no influence over the process.</li>
</ol>
<p>Beautiful how these values show that there is no ready-made answer as to how the vision of a permanent seat for citzens at the world stage will be realized. <em>“We learn and you notice it from the way people engage with each other”</em>, says <a href="https://remcovanderstoep.eu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Remco van der Stoep</a> at a webinar organized by <a href="https://g1000.nu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">G1000 in the Netherlands</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Becoming a Regional Cluster Facilitator</strong></p>
<p>For G1000 it all started over the summer of 2021, when Remco and his colleagues were invited to attend a webinar for partners of the Global Assembly. After the webinar they were asked if G1000 was interested to become a Regional Cluster Facilitator. They would provide leadership to recruitment of participants in 9 locations, which practicall meant indentifying and accompanying local Community Hosts. They said yes, without fully understanding what would be required, and were immediately entrusted with the task.</p>
<p><strong>A snapshot of people of the world</strong></p>
<p>The idea was to create a group of 100 people from around the world. NASA provided data related to the spread of the world population, which the <a href="https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sortition Foundation</a> used to drop 100 pins on the globe. The task of the cluster facilitators like G1000 was then to find a local organization in each of these diverse locations. They searched for organisations that would be willing to recruit 6 people in their community that represented a certain diversity: men and women, education levels, climate aware or not. From these 6 people per location, so 600 in total, the Sortition Foundation used an algorithm to make the final 100 as close to the world population statistics as possible.</p>
<p><strong>Local hosts</strong></p>
<p>To avoid bias in the recruitment of articipants, it was important that the local organisations did not have a climate activist agenda. The search was for local organisations that were respected and trusted by the community. In Belgium for instance, it was a group that accompanies socially marginalized people to a job. Next to recruiting 6 community members for the sortition, the local organisations would also be translating information that would be made available to the participants into the local language, and they would, where needed, organize interpretation. The working language of the Global Assembly was English.</p>
<p>Again, the key was trust. Find the organization and let them get on with the task. So, would you say yes – to participating in the Global Assembly when asked on the street? Perhaps when you were offered 600$ - which was the uniform remuneration offered to each of the participants all over the world? Enough people did say yes, though none of the clusters believed that in just a few months they would succeed in finding the 100 participants in this way. Everyone involved remembers the day in October when the zoom screen showed the 100 participants in the first Global Assembly. Wow! They did it, and without any control. “We moved at the speed of trust.”</p>
<p><strong>The central circle</strong><br/> The group providing central leadership, had been working for a long time to source funding and create an environment in which the Global Assembly could be noticed. How do you sell a Global Assembly to donors? You can invest, but you are not buying anything… It was critical to have funding that was free of conditions. The group succeeded getting funds from the Scottish government, the host of the COP26, the UN, and a few funds for democracy and climate.</p>
<p>The group also organized experts who agreed on the climate information everyone would need to have, so that there was a level playing field. They organized embedding with the COP 26 by working with country delegations who could make it possible that the Global Assembly could be heard and participate in the COP 26. In the Assembly Lab they prepared and tested the software that could enable plenary sessions with 100 participants and their interpreters. How would it work in break-out rooms of 5 with an interpreter? Interpretation made things a bit slow, and sometimes due to Covid, the interpreter would be in another room. There was a lot of testing before the Assembly started in October. (For the full assembly process – see here: <a href="https://globalassembly.org/the-process">https://globalassembly.org/the-process )</a></p>
<p><strong>Creating a movement of empowered citizens</strong><br/> To drum up public interest in the Global Assembly, there was much attention to “cultural channels” (e.g. youth and cultural groups), in particular to reach people who would not read the international news.</p>
<p>The Global Assembly also developed a community assembly toolkit with which every citizen could organise alocal assembly and provide input to the final product of the Global Assembly.</p>
<p>The 100 participants started their movement locally. “This happened by itself really. Participants started organizing actions in their community, started speaking with local politicians.” Remco gives the example of an older male with little education who felt quite overwhelmed at the start. The community host feared that he would step out, but three weeks into the Assembly, the host organization could hardly keep up with the actions of this assembly member towards to his community and local politicians. He would go round telling them what the problems, were, and what needed to be done.</p>
<p>During citizen assemblies we see time and time again that people change into engaged citizens. They discover that they have responsibility for the community, and that they can take this responsibility of co-creating a better future.</p>
<p>It was beautiful to hear that this shift to taking responsibility for a shared future does not just happen in local assemblies or national assemblies, it happens globally too. Assembly members who knew a lot about climate change and may initially have been frustrated with the slow pace of getting to know each other through translators, of building up a common information base from which to start deliberations with people from hugely differing educational backgrounds, gradually settled into learning about the living environment of fellow citizens around the world. They discovered that people have different kinds of knowledge and can provide very interesting perspectives and feedback. We help eachother to move forward. “It was an emotional goodbye at the end of the Assembly. Everyone felt the connection that had been created,” according to Remco.</p>
<p>For now, the Global Assembly is about demonstrating what citizens think about climate change to those at the international decision making table who care to listen. It is about creating a different kind of movement in the way we make international decisions. The Global Assembly will continue supporting and growing this movement. The next one is already in the making.</p>One month into the Myanmar couptag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2021-03-03:6394996:BlogPost:823912021-03-03T17:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/8628104259?profile=original" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/8628104259?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="350"></img></a></p>
<p>Today is the first time that I am in a situation where I can give the 3-finger salute that has become familiar in the pictures coming from Myanmar. Although it is online it feels like we are connected in solidarity with the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM).</p>
<p></p>
<p>Two days after this online meeting, some words still keep ringing in my…</p>
<p><a href="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/8628104259?profile=original" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/8628104259?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="350" class="align-right"/></a></p>
<p>Today is the first time that I am in a situation where I can give the 3-finger salute that has become familiar in the pictures coming from Myanmar. Although it is online it feels like we are connected in solidarity with the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM).</p>
<p></p>
<p>Two days after this online meeting, some words still keep ringing in my ears:</p>
<ul>
<li>Today Yangon and Dawei looks like a battlefield…</li>
<li>We are out there as much as we can bear…</li>
<li>We were running a lot yesterday – trying to stay away from the police, trying not to get caught.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>Reflecting on what we can continue to do and can support brings out the following from the Myanmar friends in this call:</p>
<ul>
<li>We hope our donor will consider that the situation changes day by day…</li>
<li>Our staff may be able to talk to the people around them. They were observing that people’s attitudes have changed. After the protests, people are cleaning up the waste. Let’s see if it is short lived or long term. While we talk, we may gradually, over time, start thinking again about the structural change that is needed.</li>
<li>We worry about some civil servants in the social public sectors – some may want to keep working to serve the people, but it could lead to misunderstanding by the public. The public wants to see civil servants in the health, education and engineering sectors join in the CDM.</li>
<li>Some groups have lists of who joins the CDM, others are afraid to share it... The municipal office is not really open... In town 97 civil servants participate in the CDM…</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>In the middle of the call a colleague excuses herself: “sorry, I have to see what is happening in the street…” After a few looong minutes she types in the chat: “I’m back.” At that moment, sitting in France, I can feel the constant terror people in Myanmar are living with. “What’s happening?” someone asks in the chat. “The police were entering our street, but the people have chased them and blocked the road.” It’s not for the first time that the self-organising power of the people in Myanmar strikes me. (For instance <a href="http://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/civil-society-strengthening-leading-from-behind-in-myanmar" target="_blank" rel="noopener">this blog from 2012</a>) In the same call, we hear about health workers who participate in the CDM. They are self-organizing health services to ensure that people with chronic conditions can get the check-ups they need.</p>
<p>How can we, the international community, support the people of Myanmar, this self-rganising movement with distributed leadership?</p>
<p>Our minds are racing a million miles per minute. The one thing that seems needed right now: keep collecting and sharing these stories, listen, make sense together, and (when asked) financially support each and every initiative that aims to keep the spirit of democracy alive, that keeps people safe, and that keeps humanitarian services accessible on the ground. We have to trust that the people of Myanmar and their (informal!) organisations know what to do. Their courage and actions demonstrate that they will do everything as peacefully and humanly possible to regain the fragile freedom they started to enjoy just a decade ago.</p>
<p>Finally, after the call closure, a few stay online and we just cry together, because it feels like starting from scratch and it’s all just too much to bear.</p>Empowerment and Accountability in ‘Difficult Settings’ - message 2tag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2020-05-04:6394996:BlogPost:472532020-05-04T14:20:20.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/4720725082?profile=original" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/4720725082?profile=RESIZE_710x"></img></a> This blogpost is the second inspired by John Gaventa’s 8 messages from: <a href="http://www.developmentresearch.eu/?p=632" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Rethinking Empowerment and Accountability in ‘Difficult Settings’</a> If you missed the first, you can find it…</p>
<p><a href="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/4720725082?profile=original" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/4720725082?profile=RESIZE_710x" class="align-right"/></a>This blogpost is the second inspired by John Gaventa’s 8 messages from: <a href="http://www.developmentresearch.eu/?p=632" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rethinking Empowerment and Accountability in ‘Difficult Settings’</a> If you missed the first, you can find it <a href="http://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/empowerment-and-accountability-in-difficult-settings-message-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>.<br/><br/></p>
<p><strong>Message 2</strong> <em>Theories of change often assume the existence of “accountable and responsive institutions”, towards which voice may be directed, but in ‘difficult settings’, we need to re-understand the nature of authority and question our assumptions of who is to be held to account, and by whom.</em></p>
<p>In Ethiopia, thanks to the government’s wholehearted embrace of the Millenium Development Goals, most people know the 5 basic services of the government: health, education, water and sanitation, agriculture and rural roads. Yet, also here we will find excluded groups that are not being served, either because they do not know that they too have rights to the service, or because the services are not catered to their specific needs. In rural areas, where disabled children are traditionally kept in the hut, an education office stated that they did not have a special needs school in the district because there was no demand. When a parent of a disabled child learned about the option, he went from door to door to discuss the situation and organized the demand for a special needs school in the district. A very marginalised group of pottery makers in the south of Ethiopia never knew the safety nets program was developed for ultra-poor like them. Women do not make use of agriculture services because the crops they grow are not in the extension packages, and they are never approached to discuss the agricultural problems they face. In this case, because the services and their targeting are clearly spelled out, it becomes possible to demand for it and hold the state to account when the service fails.</p>
<p>In Myanmar, the state does not have a positive presence in people’s lives, if any. Research in municipalities shows that people have very limited understanding of municipal services. They help and organize themselves. In several municipalities where we work there is no town water, people have their own well. Waste management is handled by local committees. The municipality is only known for taxes, though people have no idea what they can expect from paying those taxes. In fact, people have no expectations whatsoever from the municipality. The only day-to-day contact they may have with the state is through the ward administrator, who they elected. These days a few may know the people on the municipal committee, who were (s)elected to listen to their needs. Point is, there is no ‘social contract’ which is essential for accountability. Even if there is a grievance, there is nobody to respond, or when the state does repond (e.g. land issues) it will likely be repressive. In this context we can only ‘empower’ when we also address the willingness and ability to respond.</p>
<p>Gaventa suggests that in working with marginalised groups, we must focus <em>“attention on how the marginalised and disempowered negotiate with the relatively powerful, build coalitions and alliances, and develop their own theories of power and political change to guide their political actions and choices”</em>. In my experience, marginalized and very poor people can usually not even imagine negotiating with the powerful. It requires the ‘fearless’ in society (I wrote about them in my <a href="http://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/empowerment-and-accountability-in-difficult-settings-message-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">‘message 1’ post</a>), to care and to help find a way to overcome injustice and to rethink when ‘organising’ might be needed to get water, or deal with municipal waste. The solution might not always be found in formal state structures.</p>Empowerment and Accountability in ‘Difficult Settings’ - message 1tag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2020-03-03:6394996:BlogPost:408842020-03-03T05:41:21.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p>This blogpost is inspired by John Gaventa | <a href="http://www.developmentresearch.eu/?cat=19" rel="noopener" target="_blank">EADI/ISS Blog Series</a></p>
<p><a href="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3991417875?profile=original" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3991417875?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="300"></img></a> Over the last three decades, I have designed and implemented interventions focusing on ‘empowerment and accountability’, that aimed to contribute to a range of outcomes like good governance, equality…</p>
<p>This blogpost is inspired by John Gaventa | <a href="http://www.developmentresearch.eu/?cat=19" target="_blank" rel="noopener">EADI/ISS Blog Series</a></p>
<p><a href="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3991417875?profile=original" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/3991417875?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="300" class="align-right"/></a>Over the last three decades, I have designed and implemented interventions focusing on ‘empowerment and accountability’, that aimed to contribute to a range of outcomes like good governance, equality and social inclusion. For the last 7 years, I worked with ESAP - the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program, as Social Accountability Expert, providing guidance to the capacity development and training team. Next to that, 3 years ago, I became involved with a Social Accountability program in Myanmar. Both countries are known as “difficult” – characterised by limited civic space, strong legacies of authoritarianism, violence and repression. In fact, I have often been faced with surprise or even disbelief when I spoke internationally about our empowerment and accountability work in Ethiopia and Myanmar.</p>
<p>The 2019 report published by Civicus, <a href="https://monitor.civicus.org/PeoplePowerUnderAttack2019/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">People Power Under Attack</a>, found that 40% of the world’s population live in repressed settings (double from the previous year), and that only 3% of the world’s population live in settings which are ‘open’ – plural and stable democracies. How to achieve empowerment and accountability in more difficult settings, which appear to be the norm? The <a href="https://www.ids.ac.uk/programme-and-centre/action-for-empowerment-and-accountability-a4ea/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Action for Empowerment and Accountability Research programme</a> (A4EA) investigated this question for the past three years. The programme recently published a <a href="https://www.ids.ac.uk/publications/empowerment-and-accountability-in-difficult-settings-what-are-we-learning/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">synthesis of the first round of its research</a>, which involved over 15 projects in Myanmar, Egypt, Mozambique, Pakistan and Nigeria. A number of lessons emerge, and I will make sense of these based on my own experience in Ethiopia and Myanmar. I plan to dedicate a few blogs to the 8 messages presented by Gaventa and Oswald in <a href="https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/20.500.12413/14756/A4EA_Synthesis_Report_Phase1_FINAL.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y" target="_blank" rel="noopener">this paper</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Message 1:</strong> <em>In these settings, factors like closing civic space, legacies of fear, and distrust challenge fundamental assumptions about the conditions necessary for many processes of empowerment and accountability, which assume that ‘voice’ on the one hand and ‘responsiveness’ on the other will underpin the formation of a social contract between citizens and the state. So how do we work with fear and legacies of internalised powerlessness?</em></p>
<p><strong>Sense making - working with fear and powerlessness</strong><br/> Working with fear and distrust in Ethiopia and Myanmar, there are two quotes that stay with me:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>“I have lost 4 sons to the regimes of our country, so you can perhaps imagine that I fear speaking up…”</em> A woman in the audience, at ESAP’s Theatre for Accountability, which demonstrated how the relationships between the local government (in this case health officials) and citizens tend to play out.</li>
<li><em>“We are watching them [the military and their cronies] closely and if need be we will go back to the jungle and fight again for democracy.”</em> A 70-year-old male volunteer in a Myanmar local governance and accountability project when asked, after Aung San Suu Kyi was elected, if he believed in the promise of democracy.</li>
</ul>
<p>It makes me think that even where fear dominates, there are fearless people too, and I have learned to be on the lookout for them. I do not mean the fearless, militant youth in Ethiopia, who scared the s**t out of a very open-minded and supportive colleague in one of the Ministries we worked with. Their violent intent will be hard to rechannel. I mean the respected, quiet NGO worker who handled the situation, and took the ministerial colleague to safety. These are people who believe in change and are dedicated to it. They know how to sit in the civic space, however limited that space is, make more out of it than anyone can expect, while never taking it for granted.</p>
<p>Gaventa and Oswald call, among others, for <em>”Small interventions which build on personalised relations of trust, create safe spaces for groups to come together, and for slowly engaging authorities are important for longer term and larger scale change and are important measures of success.”</em></p>
<p>This is very much my experience too:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Focus groups</strong> in which vulnerable people can share their experiences, for instance with the safety nets program in Ethiopia (social security for the ultra-poor). Together they can find a voice: what are they willing and able to say? They think they will risk losing their safety net payment if they speak up about favoritism in the program. The front-line staff who interacts with these ultra-poor, is in turn afraid to share complaints upwards: he thinks he may miss a promotion or even risk his job. This cannot change, unless some fearless people try to find a solution together with the authorities. A small improvement will have to be made, and in my experience, the less we seek to blame the more likely it is that a way out will be found. Only then will people start to feel more comfortable to speak up to local authorities, and up-ward in the system.</li>
<li>In <strong>exchange visits</strong>, such small improvements can be shared with other communities and local authorities. Peers are the best teachers! The program can facilitate and where needed keep gently pushing the authorities to take note. It appears more difficult to protect the vulnerable from repercussion, as suggested. In my experience, people will know best what risks they are willing to take. As space opened up in Ethiopia, people started using the media to put pressure on authorities to act.</li>
<li>Many small changes do add up and when carefully brought together in <strong>multi-stakeholder settings</strong>, can inspire regional and national authorities to take action. This may be difficult for vulnerable people to realise, but communities know how to take care of their own. There are always volunteers, perhaps more educated and better off, who feel solidarity and will go out of their way to represent those who are too fearful or powerless.</li>
<li>An important <strong>additional lesson</strong> for me has been the need to <strong>work with elected representatives</strong> in local government to develop their relationship with more diverse groups in the areas they represent. In Ethiopia and Myanmar elected representatives in local government/municipalities respectively, tend to follow the messages from the party in the center. This is even true for Nepal, where a new constitution grants total autonomy to the local governments. We aim to balance this power of the party with the power of the people. Once elected representatives are in power, they stay in power by taking care of all people, not just those who voted for them. In ‘difficult settings’, it is very important that local politicians play a role in designing and monitoring social contracts: agreements between citizens and their government about what the government will do for the people, and at what costs (i.e. taxes and fees). This notion has been eye opening for elected representatives in Ethiopia. In Myanmar we have just started to test the waters.</li>
</ul>
<p>In Myanmar, where the program is now expanding, we try to bring the whole local governance system into the training room: municipal officers, elected representatives, CSO’s, political parties, business community. This never succeeds immediately, but that’s ok, just keep trying to engage everyone, or at least informed. This training group selects something small they want to see changed in the municipality. The facilitator helps them to select, connect, think, decide, act together. It can go very fast or very, very slow indeed… Three years back, within a few weeks’ things started happening in one municipality, and within months, this municipality was sharing the budget in a public hearing, which they have kept up every since. In another town, it took more than a year of trying before they booked their first joint success. Three years on, this multi-stakeholder group has grown and helped the municipality to win the Asia award for clean city. And yes, last year they also shared the budget with the public.</p>
<p>A final reflection on Gaventa and Oswald <strong>implications for programmes.</strong> I find it difficult when programs are seen in isolation of the people that make them work. In my experience, it is <strong>the human factor</strong> that makes all the difference. The best program designs can become counterproductive in the hands of those who fail to see the invisible…</p>
<p></p>
<p>Picture from: Kathmandu Post 2/3/2020</p>Gender-Responsive Budgeting in Ethiopia’s Country-wide Social Accountability Programtag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2018-07-19:6394996:BlogPost:202022018-07-19T09:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562785485?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562785485?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300"></img></a> <a href="https://gencen.isp.msu.edu/files/6915/3079/8416/WP_311.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">This academic paper</a> which I wrote together with Ellen Pieterse PhD and Tadelech Debele, provides a unique insight into how we developed gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) as a Social Accountability (SA) tool for citizens at the at the lowest tier of government in…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562785485?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562785485?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-right"/></a><a href="https://gencen.isp.msu.edu/files/6915/3079/8416/WP_311.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">This academic paper</a> which I wrote together with Ellen Pieterse PhD and Tadelech Debele, provides a unique insight into how we developed gender-responsive budgeting (GRB) as a Social Accountability (SA) tool for citizens at the at the lowest tier of government in Ethiopia.</p>
<p><br/> Initially, very few CSOs chose to work with the GRB tool developed at the start of the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program (ESAP). It provided limited implementation guidelines and also gender expertise was not well developed among the CSOs. We invited an Ethiopian gender consultant and engaged with CSOs, communities, and government gender experts in an action research process to make the GRB tool work.</p>
<p><br/> Our paper includes three in-depth cases, which show <strong>how GRB was localised and contextualised</strong> by SA practitioners. Case 1 describes the action research that made GRB more suitable to addressing gender inequalities in service delivery. These activities led to the development of the GRB tool with 6 implementation steps, which is detailed in case 2. The third case give an example of GRB tool implementation by one of the CSOs.</p>
<p><br/> The <a href="http://esap2.org.et/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Final-_Tools_GRB-31-July-2014-without-covers.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">GRB tool</a> starts with the CSO identifying and mobilizing local gender and budget expertise, which can support the social accountability process. In Ethiopia, this usually involves the Women, Children and Youth Affairs Office; the Financial Transparency and Accountability expert; and experts from the sector offices. The process is timed to coincide with the budget cycle, so that citizens can influence budget decisions and review. Before conducting gender analysis, awareness is raised among service providers on the government’s gender policies for service delivery. Then gender analysis of service access and benefits is facilitated where community members are involved in comparing the impact of budgetary decisions on women to that of men. Citizens and service providers are then brought together to discuss local budgets and set priorities for gender equitable spending on public services. This leads to prioritization of spending on improvements that promote gender equality. Citizens subsequently monitor that service improvements indeed benefit women and men as agreed during the budget discussions.</p>
<p><br/> <strong>Did gender equality in service delivery improve?</strong> <br/> Interestingly, the CSOs had already completed a full cycle of the SA process before the new GRB tool was introduced. Focusing on the same services, the communities’ priorities changed. All six case studies show that new issues were prioritised. In Debre Markos town, GRB highlighted sexual harassment of school girls. The community had already identified the need of a fence to protect students from residents who could wander into the school yard at any time. The gender analysis highlighted the negative impact of drinking houses in terms of the harassment of school girls by their customers. The issue was raised during the interface meeting, and local authorities subsequently moved the drinking houses to the other end of town.</p>
<p><br/> <strong>Analysis and conclusion</strong><br/> Budgets often perpetuate gender disparities. In Ethiopia, where the promotion of gender equality is enshrined in the law, ESAP encountered secondary schools with no separate toilets for boys and girls, and agricultural extension services that focus solely on crops grown by men. Ethiopia’s basic services may on paper appear gender neutral, but in practice they are not.</p>
<p><br/> At national and sub-national level, technical knowledge is required of how budgets and policy processes work. It is important work for the few educated, activists, and (some women) parliamentarians. At local government level, ESAP’s GRB tool brings abstract gender policies to life for men and women, service providers and district officials.</p>
<p>We hope that our work will inspire other SA practitioners to use GRB for local government budgets.</p>Community serving the people in Pharping - Nepaltag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2018-06-05:6394996:BlogPost:197032018-06-05T04:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><strong>What is inspiring or unique about the place?</strong></p>
<p><img class="align-right" height="225" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562787947?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300"></img> It all started over 50 years ago with a teacher who volunteered his services to the community for 25 years. He is over 90 years old now. His son, who they lovingly refer to as "Guru" (right in the picture), has followed in his footsteps, gradually building a team of likeminded people in the community. They run an amazing nursery, school and college, and many lifelong learning programs - for instance, when we…</p>
<p><strong>What is inspiring or unique about the place?</strong></p>
<p><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562787947?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-right" height="225"/>It all started over 50 years ago with a teacher who volunteered his services to the community for 25 years. He is over 90 years old now. His son, who they lovingly refer to as "Guru" (right in the picture), has followed in his footsteps, gradually building a team of likeminded people in the community. They run an amazing nursery, school and college, and many lifelong learning programs - for instance, when we visited an elderly lady was getting private math classes.</p>
<p>Their education programs are not just within the school walls, but everywhere in the community, and way beyond. They spot people with problems or dfficulties and finds solutions together - using an Appreciative Inquiry approach. After the Nepal earthquake 3 years ago, they have build 10 houses for families who lost everything. They find young people in the town, who have come to study but are a bit lost managing on their own and dropped out of school. These youngsters are offered a place to stay in the "bottle house" (yes - literally made of bottles, because the could not afford bricks, it has since been replicated in many other places). It was build out of need, but now it is attrackting others. They have developed a farm there, so the youngster go to school, but also learn many life and entrepreneur skills and farming methods. One of the teenage boys had just been invited 5 days ago. When I asked, what he liked most about the place, he said: friends. This shows the heart of the place: they really care deeply about the community, but it is not just charity, they build these youngsters into people who can take care of themselves, and can go back to their communities with pride and a skill set that will enable them to make a decent living.</p>
<p>The community is actually a municipality with 25,000 people, as well as a district where their learning and training initatives reach (for instance the farming field school). Their aim is to help young people find hope and appreciate and respect local life, because these days they all want to go abroad. It's fine if they do, but it's better if they understand what they will get themselves into, and can also love their communities and country first, before they go out.</p>
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<p><strong>What challenges do they currently face?</strong></p>
<p>Actually, they do not seem to think in terms of challenges. Their motto is: stay away from negative people. Link up with people who see possibilities and work together to make things happen. There is still much to do, but they keep going. The business card reads: "If not here, then where? If not now, then when? If not me, than who?</p>
<p>They spoke about one of their new projects - the clinic bus, which would enable the health camps (which they also run) to reach out to remote areas. They have many people thinking along. Some bright minds from the community, who live and work abroad are even exploring working with drones to get medicines to the right location in this mountanous country, etc. The clinic bus would mean importing a vehicle and equipment, which is heavily taxed. So they got the idea into the provincial government plan, because that will enable tax free importantion, so they will be able to afford with a little help from their friends abroad.</p>
<p>They manage with their own minds and resources, but ever since they won first prize in UNESCO's Community Learning Centre challenge several years back, they have had apportunities via government and UN agencies to travel and connect more widely: Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, the Netherlands. Many also come and want to replicate, but "they always see problems, where we always see opportunities". During our visit there were 3 young architects (girls), from India; last week there was a PHD student from JAPAN, working with the farmer field school on composting; next month, a female student from Malasia will facilitate strategic reflection, etc. The challenge is perhaps how to learn from so many insights and sustainable practices of others around the world, and make it matter locally.</p>
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<p><strong>Why do these challenges exist?</strong></p>
<p>Nepal is a land-locked country, so everything imported is very costly. The way they put it: buying from abroad makes us poor. Our money should be working in our own country.</p>
<p>There is also a deeper reason why this community learning centre started in the first place: government is not providing affordable education that prepares young people for a meaningful life in Nepal. Quality education is only in private schools, and even there, young people are educated for a life and work that only exists abroad.</p>
<p>The Ministry of education does not have a clear vision: what are we educating our young people for? For the growth economy? For jobs that do not exist in Nepal?</p>
<p>From this perspective, the government is not serving the people very well. Not clear how that happened? They had a civil war about it, but I guess now that there is peace, how do you "live it"? What does it mean to live peaceful, happy lives? Many are drawn by the western lifestyle that is so disruptive to our planet. Considering this, it is amazing how the Community Learning Center has become a way of life for all the hunderd paid staff and many more volunteers working with it. They know that happiness comes from being connected, and serving the people, those less fortunate. Sure, it was also very nice that 6 girls from the school were invited to the robitics competition in the USA, but at the end of the day, it is the life back home that matters. The grandson of the first volunteer is now living and working in the USA - teaching technical classes every Saterday through distance learning in his community in Nepal.</p>
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<p><strong>What initiatives or conditions would help them address the deeper root causes of their current challenges?</strong></p>
<p>The country is going through a deep change process, with a new constitution and far reaching levels of local government autonomy. The example of the CLC could inspire local governments in Nepal: how to really serve the people. As they said: the newly elected local governments are establishing their system to benefit from their position (not to say figuring out how to be corrupt), so it will take some time. It is hughly inspiring that there are actualy groups like this in Nepal who show what can be done if people come together and care about their community. Actually make it their life to serve the community.</p>
<p>They take much inspiration from others, eg they just had a waste management expert from another succesful initiative in Nepal stay for a few days, and they learned a lot. They also won a UNESCO prize, which enabled some of the leaders to travel, eg to Japan, where they noticed elderly people maintaining road side gardens, and helping kids to cross busy roads to their school. This made them think about meaningful roles elderly could play in their community.</p>
<p>I think they will further benefit from insights like the doughnut economy, and connections with other CLC type of initaitives in other countries, where people are living and walking the talk. Their example seems to attrackt people with ideas that would help their communities and local economy thrive, without too much dependency on outside assistance (which by the way, they are investing very well indeed: for instance matching grants for young farmers who are showing interesting initiatives and etrepreneurship). The 3 female architects came to share knowledge and experience with the place, but they found so much more than they could ever have imagined. It's a two way street - with both sharing and learning and taking inspiration to do more.</p>
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<p><strong>Given this experience, what ideas or practice could you now implement in your own context?</strong></p>
<p>Me: Things will not work if the "heart" is not there. I have known this subconsciously, and tend to go where the energy is, but I guess this is another way of looking at it.</p>
<p>I also find it quite remarkable that this group is actually performing many of the services that we would expect a local government to perform. They could perhaps serve as an example for future local government learning programs in Nepal. Peer-to-peer learning :)...</p>
<p>Tej - one of my team mates on the learning journey: Continuous engagement and long-term commitment without motives for 'personal gains' - are the key to success in bringing changes.</p>
<p>Swasti: I started to think about the problems of my community. I need to support for Urban Poor of my community, explore possibility for income generation activities for women, provide coaching/playing center for their children, cleaning campaign including provide recycle ideas for the area. I should go and talk for support from the ward chair and members to initiate the activities to solve the problems in the longer term.</p>
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<p><strong>Finally, what did you learn about yourself during the Learning Journey?</strong></p>
<p>Me: That it would be very nice to serve a community for decades. I travele and move every 4-6 years to another country, but I still have decades to go - so perhaps gradually work towards (early) retirement and settling at our farm in France. You really do not need that much to live a happy and fulfilling life.</p>
<p>Tej - 90% success depends of leadership - remaining 10% is contributed by others. I need to put the time in: the 'self' is what drives everyone to volunteer and be engaged in social work.</p>
<p>Swasti: I felt that as as human being, I need to do some good work for my own society/community. It comes always in my mind, but after this learning visit, I am more inspired that "yes, I also can do it and contribute to my community".</p>Social Accountability Practice Reflectiontag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2018-05-30:6394996:BlogPost:196032018-05-30T03:30:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><strong><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786099?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786099?profile=original" width="311"></img></a></strong></p>
<p><em>This text was developed as "project" example for the "<a href="http:/www.presencing.org/#/transforming-capitalism-lab" rel="noopener" target="_blank">transforming capitalism lab</a>" of the Presencing Institute at MIT.</em></p>
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<p><strong>What is the main vision behind your work?</strong></p>
<p>My work is "capacity development" of…</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786099?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786099?profile=original" width="311" class="align-right"/></a></strong></p>
<p><em>This text was developed as "project" example for the "<a href="http:/www.presencing.org/#/transforming-capitalism-lab" target="_blank" rel="noopener">transforming capitalism lab</a>" of the Presencing Institute at MIT.</em></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>What is the main vision behind your work?</strong></p>
<p>My work is "capacity development" of Ethiopian organisations that are bringing citizens and local governments together to assess and improve basic services in the 5 pro-poor sectors: health, education, water and sanitation, agriculture, and rural roads. Millions of Ethiopians have been able to lift themselves out of poverty in the past decades, following pro-poor sector investments, which are currently still at 70% of the national budget. My work is part of a larger government initiative to improve accountability and transparency, which is hoped to lead to good governance for sustainable development. </p>
<p>The vision is that when citizens deeply understand and shape governments' intensions for poverty reduction, they can really take ownership of public service delivery, and make these work better for them. Also, because these services are provided at the local level, decentralised, citizens can much better engage to ensure that everyone is being served (or no one left behind - as the SDGs say). The approach is inclusive, dialogical, and joint action oriented (social contacts are re-negotiated), and benefits from 'intermediary' process facilitators /capacity builders (ie local NGOs).</p>
<p>This vision (which is still emerging) sits in an environment where, in principle, only locally funded local organisations can engage in 'sensitive' good governance work; where the last elections have gone for 97% to one party; where parts of this young federal state are protesting, but hope to a peaceful path forward has flooded right back in with a recently appointed new PM.</p>
<p><strong>Describe the concrete details: who, what, where and how you operate</strong></p>
<p>VNG International - the Netherlands Association of Municipalities, with 2 partners, won the bid for the Ethiopian Social Accountability Program Phase 2 (and we just heard today that we have won the bid for phase 3, which will expand to half of the districts in the country, ie 500). We are the Management Agency of a World Bank administered, multi-donor trust fund - so far 30+ million USD spend in the past 7 years for capacity development, with 50+ million USD for the next 5 years with a 10 year horizon.</p>
<p>In phase 2, the program has worked for almost 7 years with 100+ Ethiopian NGOs, who receive grants to run social accountability projects across all regional states in 223 districts, roughly 25% of all districts in the country. We work under the Ministry of Finance, and have a close collaboration with all the nine regional governments and the two city administrations of Ethiopia.<br/> Together with these local NGO and regional government partners, we have begun to shift the way citizens view their local government and vice versa. The blame culture is turning into a culture of dialogue. Each sub-district that engages in the social accountability process that we developed over time achieves remarkable improvements in the basic services sectors, mostly with local resources. All have achieved improvements, each following a unique path, with many experiencing transformational change.</p>
<p>We, the Management Agency, lead this messy change 'from behind'.We have our feet on the ground, spending much time with our partners to deeply understand what shifts and why (and what doesn't and why). We run bi-annual, large scale events that bring hundreds of innovating stakeholders from communities, local, regional and federal governments, and partner NGOs across the country together in one room to reflect on what is emerging and where they can go next. We welcome new stakeholders who want to help take the social accountability process where they think it can go next. All of this, it must be said, under the visionary leadership of the Ministry of Finance.</p>
<p><strong>What is the great accomplishment of your work so far?</strong></p>
<p>One great accomplishment is that regional governments now host sector dialogues with the ESAP2 local NGO partners, based on the patterns of service improvements (also what does not improve - though citizens want it to). It is unusual in Ethiopia to have policy dialogues with NGOs - and this is now happening across the country.</p>
<p>The Ministry of Health is ready to work with us on questions of institutionalising practice and ways of working that have proven helpful under the program, because it gets better results (eg in 2015, women delivering at health centres doubled with the ESAP2 program).</p>
<p>Some regional councils have asked us to develop learning materials on social accountability and <br/> the district council - we already have a video that is being used to spread the involvement of the councils. The video shows how locally elected people's representatives have become much better informed and closer to the people, to diverse groups of people, by participating in or providing leadership to social accountability processes. They become more empowered to engage on equal footing with the often better educated, more powerful executive.<br/> None of this was by design - we started with a few actors and the others mentioned here have joined (mostly) on their own initiative, along the way.</p>
<p><strong>What personal practices have enabled you to break through existing paradigms?</strong></p>
<p>Deep listening - it doesn’t matter where I think things can go (although I may 'see' where things can go before others do), what matters is where different stakeholders want to go.</p>
<p>Sense-making and studying patterns with my team, with a small group of NGO directors, with a group of experts who used to work for the ESAP2 projects, have moved on but are still engaging with us (how amazing is that?!). Finding the one or two things every six months that will help everyone to see what is happening, to think about what is possible.</p>
<p>Enabling people to do what they want to do, but building in rigour and reflection, accepting failure along the way, but learning and continuing. Withholding judgement.</p>
<p>Promoting documentation and communication. Large scale change can benefit from documentation, but this is hard to get right with over 100 local NGOs who are used to "tick the donor boxes", and write terrible reports with words that say next to nothing. We have invested in participatory video, story writing (we still do quarterly writeshops, to develop reflective practice with our partners), participatory theatre, finding the local change heroes, and so forth. Each year we have a documentation and communication award (you win by documenting AND communicating, reaching people with what you documented to stimulate more dialogue). We now have hundreds of short videos in local languages that are being used to spread the social accountability experiences and practices to other communities. In the next phase we hope to build a MOOC that can engage many more civil servants, local NGOs and citizen groups in social accountability practices.</p>
<p>While all these practices are important, I know that what is even more important is what I bring to all of this, in my heart, as a person who deeply beliefs that people, societies, are capable of caring and changing.</p>
<p><strong>What organizational practices have enabled your accomplishments to date?</strong></p>
<p>Flexibility - you have to be able to go with the flow that presents itself, new stuff WILL come up, it can't be planned.</p>
<p>Accountability - explain what is happening and why, never hiding failure, never hiding steps that could be perceived as too bold or politically too sensitive.</p>
<p>Cross functional teams - our monitoring work is done with people from our grants, finance, capacity development, M&E, and communication teams (the internal audit team followed it own course though!). This breaks through the organisational silos - and builds understanding of each others competencies, which all have a function in making the program successful. In fact we had to reduce staff during the current bridging phase (going from phase 2 to 3 - keeping the local NGOs expertise available for the large scale-up), and have merged the remaining CD, M&E and Comms staff into one unit, which works fabulously.</p>
<p>An M&E system that does something with data collected (benchmarks for our bi-annual learning events, service improvement overviews for the regional government dialogues with the local NGOs), and that aims for cycles of learning and improvement that follow local ambitions and realities (including the current State of Emergency - where citizens involved in the program told us how they stopped destruction of public facilities because "these belong to the people".)<br/> An action-research approach to developing method / ways of working. For instance a gender responsive budget tool was not working in practice and we adjusted it through action-research. It is working now.</p>
<p>Willingness to spend money on bringing diverse stakeholders together, lots of people, trusting that however unlikely in the beginning, they WILL build relationships, and WILL go on to do new things, as long as we can help create unity, understanding, safe space to speak and to be bold.<br/> Willingness to stick with it over the years, to convince decision makers and funders that the program cannot be stopped, not even for a year until the next phase is designed.<br/> Let those lead who can and want to lead - not just those who have the title to lead (can be very confusing initially for some of the Ethiopian colleagues - males especially, not sure why.) </p>
<p><strong>What is currently keeping your project, initiative or organisation from moving to the next level of impact?</strong></p>
<p>There is an important legal hurdle around which type of NGOs are allowed to do the intermediary and capacity building work under the program. If the legal argument wins from the political argument, we may have to start from scratch with a different type of local NGOs. At least it is clear that this is "the future the government and people want" that's not in question fortunately. The question is can it be constructed with the help of organisations that are internationally connected. Interesting - the fact that we, an international organisation are to some extend leading this program doesn't seem to be in question.</p>
<p><strong>To move toward a 4.0 way of operating, what enabling conditions would be needed?</strong></p>
<p>I will need to think about this...</p>
<p>One thing that springs to mind - the international donor community in Ethiopia is in my view pushing for things that have no local roots (yet). It is important that the international community earns to practice the lessons from the AID Effectiveness agenda, from many years back, eg about local ownership. There is something very wrong with demanding short term results, that can be sold to the voters back home. In a way I can't complain though - the donor community has agreed with the Ethiopian government to take a 10 year horizon with this program. Perhaps some are learning (or is it really just the strong Ethiopian government?).</p>
<p><strong>What is the most important thing you have learned personally from your work?</strong></p>
<p>Despite cultural differences, human beings are in essence the same everywhere. There are practices of listening, of being together, of dialogue that build new relationships and trust where none was possible before. I am also much clearer about what one of my mentors once told me when I was wondering what I was doing to make things happen among diverse individuals in a group - it is not what you do, it is who you are. I can and must be more ambitious to contribute to a better future.</p>
<p><strong>What are the key questions or opportunities in your field that need to be explored in the next 5-10 years?</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>How can we harness the willingness of volunteers to go out of their way to help vulnerable people in society get access to better services through mainstream decision making and governance processes? How do we motivate and reward such volunteers?</li>
<li>How do we break through the idea that peoples' representatives can represent us without staying in touch with us?</li>
<li>How do we bring politics closer to the people, so that we can show that better results emerge for "ordinary people" when these "ordinary people" are engaged?</li>
</ul>towards peaceful societiestag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2018-05-21:6394996:BlogPost:200012018-05-21T14:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p>Based on an interview with a local governance advisor in Kathmandu, Nepal<br></br><br></br> <strong>What was most interesting about what I heard in this interview?</strong><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786134?profile=original" width="318"></img></p>
<p>We have peace in nepal now, and a new constitution that has the most far reaching form of local autonomy and respect for diversity in Asia. Now how do we redefine 'peace'? He always gets bogged down into these kind of discussions. Wants to come together with other professonals to volontarily contribute experience…</p>
<p>Based on an interview with a local governance advisor in Kathmandu, Nepal<br/><br/> <strong>What was most interesting about what I heard in this interview?</strong><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786134?profile=original" width="318" class="align-right"/></p>
<p>We have peace in nepal now, and a new constitution that has the most far reaching form of local autonomy and respect for diversity in Asia. Now how do we redefine 'peace'? He always gets bogged down into these kind of discussions. Wants to come together with other professonals to volontarily contribute experience for change and hope in society.</p>
<p>He has recently observed that there is so much joy in rural communities, for instance at a village wedding, looking at the crowd, people are so happy and laughing, not just the kids, everyone is having a great time. It can't compare to the luxurious, expensive, almost boring city weddings - these are not satisfying. How do we get back to that joyful way of living - that community spirit? Western influences are so great, even his two children now living in Australia have developed these ego centred ifestyles, they are more on their own than they are together.</p>
<p><strong>What are the challenges this person currently faces?</strong><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786134?profile=original" target="_self"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"/></a>How to get others exited to join, volontarilly in nation building. Most of the local NGOs no longer work for their own cause, the work, and run the agendas of donor projects.</p>
<p><strong>Where do they see emerging possibilities in their work?</strong><br/> There is a lot of money for 'capacity building' of local governments. Can we influence how this money gets spend? Can we offer, with a group of like minded change facilitators, a course - like the leadership development and professional develpment programs we used to run together in the past. Helping people to come back to themselves first, and than gradually build new, more supportive social structures.</p>
<p>We could draft our proposal, and start with the people and programs we know. We can offer to accompany your teams for at least one year on this change journey - working towards transformational change, peaceful societies that live in harony with each other and with nature.</p>
<p><strong>What did I learn about how to create generative conversations?</strong></p>
<p>If you focus on the heart - you connect differently with people.</p>
<p><strong>Given this experience, what ideas or practices could I now implement in my own context?</strong><br/> It brought back the leadership development programs I used to be involved with. How such a long term process, moving from self, to team, to organisation, to society - is still very relevant. Especially if we can combine it with insights from 'creating the future we want'. This 'old' practice that I loved can give a good structure to facilitating large scale change.</p>Accountability in Myanmar – a tale of two townstag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2017-09-26:6394996:BlogPost:192022017-09-26T05:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786415?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786415?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300"></img></a> While many CSO in Myanmar are facing Nay Pyi Taw, we have our feet in a muddy drain and waste dump of two towns in Tanintharyi Region. We, that is <a href="http://www.vng-international.nl/" target="_blank">VNG</a> and <a href="http://www.lokaahlinn.com/" target="_blank">Loka Ahlin</a> in cooperation with the regional government and with support from the…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786415?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786415?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-right"/></a>While many CSO in Myanmar are facing Nay Pyi Taw, we have our feet in a muddy drain and waste dump of two towns in Tanintharyi Region. We, that is <a href="http://www.vng-international.nl/" target="_blank">VNG</a> and <a href="http://www.lokaahlinn.com/" target="_blank">Loka Ahlin</a> in cooperation with the regional government and with support from the <a href="https://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/myanmar-burma_en" target="_blank">European Union Delegation to Myanmar</a>, are trying out social accountability training. Because accountability and transparency can quickly become quite abstract, our training is organised to solve a town problem. After each of the 3 modules, participants from the municipality and other relevant government departments, CSOs and the business community apply the insights and skills gained to a small ‘real life’ project. In one of the towns participants selected a clogged up drain, in another town they aim to improve the waste management satiation in a few wards. What are we learning along the way?</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Access to information</strong> <br/> There can be no accountability without knowing what the municipality is responsible for. The challenge lies in developing a relationship that gives access to information, for instance the municipal budget. We discovered that the order to keep all government information internal is still active, so action may be taken if staff shares information with the public. This may be why one town doesn’t share the budget yet with the elected representatives in the ‘Development Affairs Committee’ (the DAC is a fledgling local council, many representatives have been selected rather than elected through popular vote), while the other town has developed a brochure with budget information for citizens.</p>
<p>One cannot underestimate the importance of access to information. As an example, in the ‘drain’ town the ward administrator was getting ‘two roads and one bridge’, but the ward wanted their drain to be made functional. Is it possible to have a drain, rather than two roads and a bridge? The ward administrator explains the urgency of the drain project: “The water stagnates and it becomes very messy, with lots of mosquitos. Last year 2 children died in the ward from dengue fever, which we believe is due to this drain problem. Hundreds of people suffer from this bad drain: the smell becomes hard to stand after the rainy season.” The training group requested the municipal engineer to make an estimate of the work to be done, which came out very (too) expensive. Later the group found out that government estimates are almost double to cater for inflation: you never know when a project becomes reality, and as it is impossible to adjust budget estimates, it is better to prepare enough funds ahead of time. Moreover, the municipal law states that all activities must be audited by government auditor – which implies that it should not tender to the private sector, and quality standards do not always apply in self-implementation. Gradually participants discover such pieces of information – which obviously determines what can and cannot be expected from the municipality: what it can be held accountable for.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Serving all people in the town</strong><br/> One of the municipal staff was very much taken with a stakeholder visualisation tool, with which training participants began to identify different interests: she wanted to take it back to her office. It is important to consider the ability of CSO to represent and/or bring out interests of various groups, including vulnerable groups and gender dimensions. How representative are the CSOs of a variety of interests? In the case of our training, the CSO participants do not seem to have deep roots in society. They are not representing a particular membership. It is interesting that participants from the local NLD and USDP political parties do represent a membership (and they behave like activist CSOs). However – the municipality should serve all people, not only those who voted for the party who is in power. Efforts must be made to hear all voices. In this training we focus on a CSO role as facilitators: they can study a variety of voices and bringing these to the municipal table. It will be a major achievement if one of the municipalities can actually host such a public meeting with a variety of people/interests present.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>New relationships and small results</strong><br/> On our last visit, the Executive Officers (EO), highest municipal official in town, came to the training. It was the first time ever for most CSO participants to engage with a decision maker in an open manner. It proved impossible to change the ‘roads and bridge’ into a drain project. Fortunately the EO of this town had been asked by the region to develop a budget for one year rather than 6 months, so there could be some space in the budget for a drain. The EO invited the ward to submit their project, “but we have many criteria”. So that’s the next piece of information which the CSOs will try to uncover. They will also prepare to present the project to the DAC, so that the impact of the investment can be well understood by the decision makers. Before the EO left the training room, another ward administrator made sure his ward could also submit projects to the municipality. Perhaps the EO should work to inform all the wards in the town about this opportunity? Note that there is no official relationship between the ward administrators (who are part of the township administration) and the municipality. Oh well, lots of new local governance relationships are emerging, and these will gradually get documented and eventually approved by legislators.</p>
<p>In the other town things have been moving a bit more swiftly. A small group of CSO participants has already been invited 3 times to attend the DAC meetings. The group also invited the DAC chair to attend one of their meetings regarding the study of the waste management situation. The DAC chair took a copy of the attendance list and created a Viber group to stay in touch with the CSOs. A few weeks later bird flu broke out in the town, and the DAC chair asked the CSOs to help out, which they did. That was an unexpected, successful first “joint action” between the municipality and CSOs in this town. Not a bad training result and we are not even done yet!</p>Shouting at the system doesn't make it worktag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2017-09-01:6394996:BlogPost:188012017-09-01T13:22:32.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p id="yui_3_17_2_1_1504264600496_571"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786051?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786051?profile=original" width="300"></img></a> So if shouting doesn’t work, what will? On the 22nd of June 2017, CPAN, in partnership with Mzumbe University, INTRAC and the Foundation for Civil Society, brought together researchers, policy-makers and practitioners at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London. The event, <strong>Improving local governance and service delivery…</strong></p>
<p id="yui_3_17_2_1_1504264600496_571"><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786051?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786051?profile=original" width="300" class="align-right"/></a>So if shouting doesn’t work, what will? On the 22nd of June 2017, CPAN, in partnership with Mzumbe University, INTRAC and the Foundation for Civil Society, brought together researchers, policy-makers and practitioners at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London. The event, <strong>Improving local governance and service delivery 'Shouting at the system won’t make it work!</strong>' can be watched <a href="http://www.chronicpovertynetwork.org/blog/2017/5/15/event-shouting-at-the-system-wont-make-it-work" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<p>Social accountability mechanisms are a means for holding local government to account, and for improving basic service like education, health, water and sanitation. This requires access to information (what are our entitlements?), and collective action (do we all have the same view about a service?) towards a constructive dialogue with those responsible for the service. However such information is not readily accessible (sits in dense documents in district, regional and national capitals), and collective action can be hard if not dangerous to organise. Moreover, accountabilities are not always well defined, and rest at different levels: what can be solved locally, what requires action from the district, regional or even national level? For instance, medicine procurement at a local health centre may depend on centralised medicine purchase.</p>
<p>We have therefore seen the emergence of more complex theories of change that try to reveal the complexities that frame social accountability systems and that propose a more innovative and flexible approach that respects the given context.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>ESAP2 - growing data gradually from the bottom-up</strong></p>
<p>In the Ethiopia Social Accountability (SA) program after 4 years of SA experiences in 25% of the districts across the country, we have recently developed sector based checklists for local communities. The lists were developed based on the issues that came up regularly in SA processes all over the country during the past 4 years. These lists are now used by local communities to monitor what was raised and what solved in the SA process (and yes, they can and do add the issues that are missing). The checklists are collected an aggregated by a CSO at district level (quarterly at the moment) and send to us (the management agency of the program) for compilation and analysis. We develop regional sector graphs, which CSOs are now using at regional level for sector dialogues. Quite unique in Ethiopia. See our <a href="http://esap2.org.et/?p=3930" target="_blank">latest data reports set</a> which includes questions for dialogue.</p>
<p>Reason we are doing the analysis ourselves at the moment is that the 86 CSOs currently in the program found it hard to imagine what would happen if they brought their data about service issues raised and solved together. They’re getting it now: aggregate data is powerful and has started to lead to some responsive regional sector actions. We can now let the data analysis gradually go to see where it lands and finds a home. Meanwhile, we are exploring with the sector ministries how the citizens’ lists could help streamline access to information about standards and budgets – like citizens’ charters for services.</p>
<p>It’s important to recognise, respect and work with complex local diversity, but to tackle systemic issues, at some point you need to collect and aggregate data. Our response to this duality has been to build an ‘index’ from the grassroots up, slowly but surely. So far so good…</p>It's about finding the questions – not giving the answerstag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2017-03-07:6394996:BlogPost:173022017-03-07T11:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786089?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786089?profile=original" width="180"></img></a> Whenever I meet social accountability practitioners abroad, they wonder: Social Accountability in Ethiopia, with civil society involvement, really? We all have these boxes in our head – Ethiopia, restrictive NGO environment, one party system, top-down political economy, etc… So many “challenges” can be named, and yet, we are running the single largest social accountability…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786089?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786089?profile=original" width="180" class="align-right"/></a>Whenever I meet social accountability practitioners abroad, they wonder: Social Accountability in Ethiopia, with civil society involvement, really? We all have these boxes in our head – Ethiopia, restrictive NGO environment, one party system, top-down political economy, etc… So many “challenges” can be named, and yet, we are running the single largest social accountability investment in Africa, and the results have surprised everyone involved. How can we put our assumptions aside and learn to nurture the potential of change in the local context?</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Responding to challenges with questions</strong></p>
<p>I remember early on in the program that CSOs were challenging me – you don’t know Ethiopia, it’s only because of donors that this program is allowed. I was thinking – really? This strong government is allowing CSOs to work in close to 30% of its districts, all over the country, just because of donors? Our question was: can you implement your project and let us know if you get blocked along the way? Meanwhile we supported the CSOs to sit in the service delivery space they had been given and demonstrate the difference they could make. Three years later government is supporting program design to up-scale social accountability to the rest of the country.</p>
<p>Regional governments were also challenging us – we don’t know what ‘you’ are up to?! I was thinking – we (the management agency) are facilitating a government partnership program with local CSOs. Our question was: how can we better inform, collaborate with you? A year later, regional governments were promoting social accountability in federal and other meetings. Collaboration between the CSOs and regional governments has since been formalised to facilitate social accountability.</p>
<p>We work at the level of decentralised local government, but some accountabilities for water schemes and rural roads lie at the regional level. Many stakeholders were cautioning us and pointing at the political sensitivities of engaging higher levels of government. Our question to CSO partners was: who has connections, who can explore? Two years later many service issues regarding water and rural roads had been solved by citizens engaging government beyond the district level.</p>
<p>Initially concepts of vulnerability were both vague and daunting (e.g. in many cases disabled people are hidden from society), but we asked ‘who is not yet being served?’ and our partners helped local governments to hear the stories of these groups. This has had empowering effects, and has inspired citizens and local governments alike to do more for vulnerable groups with the limited resources available to them.</p>
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<p><strong>Trust building: shifting deep-rooted attitudes in society</strong></p>
<p>It is clear, yet often forgotten, that citizens will not engage in governance processes, unless there is an advantage to be gained from participation. This engagement may be extra difficult for citizens that have experienced violence or repression from previous governments. I remember a woman saying publicly – I have buried 5 children during the Red Terror, so you may imagine that is it hard for me to engage with my government today. Discrimination has similar effects. Beneficiaries of the Productive Safety Nets Program were referred to as ‘bulldozers’, because their labour is used for public works. It never occurred to them that they have the right to be served with respect, leave alone that they may have something to say about what support would work best for them. If they speak up, they may lose their entitlements all together. In such cases trust can only be built through responsive and meaningful government action that is respectful and touches peoples’ deep needs.</p>
<p>Educated, salaried citizens suffer from similar mind-sets. They may pay to expedite the process of getting an energy connection for instance, but after multiple visits and no response they return home with the attitude popular in Ethiopia: ‘thou shall not sue a king... nor do you plough a sky’- signifying that it is impossible to demand from a higher authority. This kind of paradigm has passed from generations to generation, and needs ‘interlocutors’ that help to unlearn such deep rooted notions and prepare the fertile ground for better governance to flourish.</p>
<p>Such societal attitudes also prevail among civil servants. I have often heard district authorities claim: our policies do not discriminate, we treat everyone equally. While that may be the intention, not everyone is in a position to take advantage of policies, and some don’t even think it applies to them. There are many female farmers in Ethiopia who believe that agricultural services are not for them, because services are not tailored to their specific needs. There is a social group in Ethiopia (potters) who are treated similar to the untouchables in India – they were very surprised to hear that the social protection program also applies to them. They have this mind-set that is totally formed by how society views them: an intriguing form of powerlessness.</p>
<p>Many people feel better respected after they shared how it felt to be treated with disrespect by government staff, at the health centre for instance. Health workers admitted feeling ashamed when they “looked into the mirror” of peoples experience with them. This helped them to change. Apparently it is not culturally accepted to behave in a disrespectful way, but somehow that gets forgotten until civil servants are confronted with the effects of their behaviour.</p>
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<p><strong>From island of success to shifting national norms and practice</strong></p>
<p>How can good governance become the norm? In ESAP we have two streams of thought: social accountability as a way of life, and social accountability as part of government policies and structures. Both need work, but the nature of that work is very different. The systems responses that we know, like “change the law”, don’t seem to work. So many reforms have not yielded the intended results. And yet, there are these project islands were new norms and practices are emerging. How do we connect those, enable them to grow, enable society to discover how to change, step by step?</p>
<p>There seems to be an inherently human element to wanting to do well for those less fortunate – many of the changes we see happening (not just in Ethiopia) are due to the relentless efforts of volunteers, citizens as well as service providers, with local governments following suit. Where do we see this local spirit translating into national politics and incentives? Or put differently, why is there still so much disconnect?</p>
<p>Researcher Fletcher Tembo observes that the ‘human element’, e.g. volunteering that I refer to, is very important and operates most effectively in localised initiatives, where trust is high and actors obtain a lot of non-monetary rewards from these actions. The disconnect happens when we move from localised actions to the sub-national and national levels when these local practices are not allowed to inform the sub-national and national practice, mainly because at that level other incentives kick in – e.g. strong elite interests colluding with businesses and the way the bureaucracy operates. All these practices are heavily political in nature – so his definition of politics here is not limited to political party contestations but all the different contestations and struggles for access to power and resources characterising society-state relationships in a given country context. As a suggested way to overcome these challenges, he recommends an incremental approach where localised practices become ‘policy experiments’ for scaling up to sub-national and national levels through a collective action approach that is based on addressing conflicting incentives. Fletcher has recently been researching and writing about this (<a href="https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/8561.pdf" target="_blank">interlocutors</a>, and <a href="http://www.oecd.org/dac/governance-peace/governance/docs/Governance%20Notebook%203.5%20Tembo.pdf" target="_blank">building trust-based relationships</a>).</p>
<p>In the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program we now support CSOs to strategise around processes that get more complex as communities learn and their organisations connect, for instance combining Community Score Card results for a certain sector and geographic area, so that it can be used for regional policy dialogue. Regional parliaments have started to take note. We are continuing to support such emerging initiatives by asking questions that encourage action, forward thinking and that create clarity about the support we should be providing so that local actors can create the forms of governance that work for them, and produce better results.</p>
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<p>(this blog was written for the <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2017" target="_blank">World Development Report 2017 - Governance and the Law</a> website. It is inspired by an <a href="http://gpsaknowledge.org/forums/topic/engaging-with-citizen-voices-and-experiences-the-2017-world-development-report-on-governance-and-the-law/#.WL6WqdL5jIU" target="_blank">online forum</a> I co-facilitated as part of the consultation for the WDR 2017 at the Global Partnership for Social Accountability.)</p>Unlocking the inclusive potential of government policies and servicestag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2016-09-08:6394996:BlogPost:165072016-09-08T08:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562790559?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562790559?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350"></img></a> Government policies and basic services have the potential to create opportunities for large numbers of people to work themselves out of poverty. Local governments and frontline service providers are ideally placed to enable the inclusion, so that policies and services reach their potential. Here are some of the insight we gained and lessons we learned from interlocutor work…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562790559?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="350" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562790559?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350" class="align-right"/></a>Government policies and basic services have the potential to create opportunities for large numbers of people to work themselves out of poverty. Local governments and frontline service providers are ideally placed to enable the inclusion, so that policies and services reach their potential. Here are some of the insight we gained and lessons we learned from interlocutor work by CSOs in the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program (ESAP).</p>
<p>Front line civil servants work in often remote areas, for low salaries and with very limited resources. They deserve more respect. Their training has been technical at best, and they are not always well informed about government policies, plans and budgets. They function in a system where they follow instructions. They may not understand that policies and services may exclude certain groups, unless specific action is taken that recognises social difference. Let’s look at two examples of inclusive change achieved by ESAP in the education sector.</p>
<p>Each district in Ethiopia receives funding for special needs education. In one district this money was never used. The district education office explained that there was no demand. It turned out that disabilities where a taboo. Children with a disability were kept in the family hut, away from society. An activist father never knew about the possibility for his disabled son to get an education nearby. He had been saving money to send his child to a special school in the capital. When he learned about the local possibilities, he personally went from door to door to convince families that their differently abled children could have a productive life ahead of them. With the increasing demand, the district opened a special needs wing in one of the schools.</p>
<p>The second example shows a case where awareness about special needs education actually enhanced stigmatisation. A deputy director of a primary school in Addis Ababa explained that she used to send children with a disability to the school which caters for special needs. When she learned more about an inclusive approach to education, her school found ways to accommodate students (and even a teacher!) who are differently abled, because with minor adjustments in access to school facilities they are perfectly capable of functioning in a regular school. Such actions take the pressure of the special needs school, which used to get many children that did not really have special needs beyond an access ramp. Because this school is no longer seen as serving special needs kids only, parents have started sending their ‘normally abled’ children to this school again. These kids are finding ways to appreciate the qualities of their differently abled fellow students, which builds a more inclusive society.</p>
<p>Such changes happened because CSOs helped citizens as well as civil servants to reflect on policies and standards of the government. Here are some of the things they learned:</p>
<ul>
<li>Do not deal with excluded groups in isolation of others in society. Inclusion has a cost, and this is best negotiated among the different social groups in society. When excluded groups get a chance to be heard, and are treated as equally deserving of opportunity, society and its government can find ways to cater for their needs. When excluded groups sit at the table, society is perfectly capable to balance special needs with the wider needs of society. This is in fact the essence of social democracy.</li>
<li>Do not blame government for not delivering for excluded groups. They have many competing interests to take into account, with very limited resources. Help them to study inclusive development objectives and to reflect on what they can do to achieve these within the limited means available. Frontline providers have learned that when they truly listen to various needs of diverse groups in society, it opens up possibility. Dialogue on ways forward has multiple benefits: priorities get carefully studied and negotiated so that government can be more responsive. Community groups find ways to contribute to realise inclusive development goals, and to improve service facilities so that they can serve all.</li>
<li>It is hard to be an interlocutor, because social stigma and attitudes towards government are deeply entrenched. Yet if you stick with it, and trust the process that works towards open dialogue, you will experience that all people (including civil servants) can live up to their potential. The main role of an interlocutor is to enable social groups to be heard at the tables where government budgets get planned and evaluated. Do not speak on their behalf – their own voices are much more powerful.</li>
</ul>
<p>The following poem was written by Ato Kassahun Melesse, a representative of visually impaired people (see picture above), who was invited to share his remarkable experience and achievements in one of the bi-annual learning events of ESAP. He offered this poem (my memory of it) in his closing speech – reading from braille.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>When I was asked to close my eyes</em><br/> <em>At the start of the workshop</em><br/> <em>And to imagine beautiful Ethiopia</em><br/> <em>I could not see myself in it</em><br/> <em>People like me do not have a place</em><br/> <em>In our beautiful country</em><br/> <em>Now that I stand in front of you</em><br/> <em>I feel different</em><br/> <em>You have really listened to me</em><br/> <em>You have eaten meals with me</em><br/> <em>Even high officials</em><br/> <em>I begin to see my place now</em><br/> <em>I am inspired to continue</em><br/> <em>The dialogue among different social groups</em><br/> <em>And with our government</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><br/></i></p>Shifting mind-sets in Ethiopiatag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2016-04-16:6394996:BlogPost:151152016-04-16T14:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786244?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786244?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300"></img></a> We took a bit of a risk at the National Conference Ethiopia Social Accountability Program phase 2 (ESAP2) by starting with the Theatre for Social Accountability. Yet as soon as the coughing began that brings the audience into the imaginary health centre I knew the theatre would work well to introduce the audience to ESAP2’s approach and results. Within an hour, the audience…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786244?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786244?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-right"/></a>We took a bit of a risk at the National Conference Ethiopia Social Accountability Program phase 2 (ESAP2) by starting with the Theatre for Social Accountability. Yet as soon as the coughing began that brings the audience into the imaginary health centre I knew the theatre would work well to introduce the audience to ESAP2’s approach and results. Within an hour, the audience had been exposed to the complete social accountability process as well as the societal mind-set change and service improvement results it brought about. “What a creative and informative way of introducing social accountability,” said Peter Knip, the director of <a href="http://www.vng-international.nl/" target="_blank">VNG International</a>, which leads the ESAP2 management agency.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Service improvements</strong></p>
<p>One of the conference objectives was to share lessons and results with the sector ministries, so as to bring them on board the decentralised social accountability movement created by the program across all regions of this vast and diverse country with close to 100 million people. We produced findings and lessons papers for each of the 5 basic service sectors the program worked in: education, health, water & sanitation, agriculture (including productive safety nets) and rural roads. The <a href="http://esap2.org.et/esap2-national-conference/" target="_blank">sector result papers</a> are summarized in ‘one-pagers’ and infographics, and include an overview of investments mobilised locally to achieve service improvements.</p>
<p>In a closing remark, the head of the Planning and Policy Department of the Ministry of Health expressed “respect and awe” for ESAP2’s ability to improve decentralised spending and mobilise additional resources for greater access and better quality services. In sum, targeted health facilities increased capacity and quality of services by adding more beds, more staff, more medicines, more electricity, better water & sanitation facilities, longer opening hours, friendlier service and sometimes even better access roads. As a result, the outpatient numbers increased by 68.6 percent, slightly better than the national average and facility births at least doubled, with many clinics experiencing five and six-fold rises. Vulnerable groups gained better access to services, sub-optimal drug purchasing systems were addressed to overcome medicine shortages, waste disposal standards were implemented, and incorrect practices, like paying for the ambulance, were stopped.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Social Accountability tools</strong></p>
<p>Conference participants also learned about the effectiveness of two social accountability tools developed by ESAP2: <a href="http://esap2.org.et/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/GRB-paper-final.pdf" target="_blank">Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB)</a>, and <a href="http://esap2.org.et/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ESAP2-experiences-with-PETS-final.pdf" target="_blank">Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS)</a>. The GRB experience demonstrated that a simple mainstreaming tool can bring real service improvements for women & men, girls & boys – compared to other social accountability tools used in ESAP2 (i.e. community score card, citizen report card, and participatory planning and budgeting). The PETS tool highlighted, among others, the need to bring the often substantial community contributions on-budget, perhaps as a first tax base for local governments. An advisor of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation, which chairs the ESAP2 Steering Committee, observed that the government has limited resources to supervise and audit facility level expenditures and thus welcomes citizens’ engagement in this area.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Governance</strong></p>
<p>A second conference objective was to situate social accountability in the local governance arena and the good governance agenda of the government. While ESAP2 started with capacity development of citizens and their groups to interact with service providers, the local councils began to use the insights gained about service performance and citizen priorities to strengthen their oversight and decision making functions. This was noted by some of the regional (state) councils, three of which have actively embraced social accountability and count on playing a convening / facilitating role in the future, much like the Ombudsman and Auditor General in other countries.</p>
<p>Local governance and good governance are important elements of the enabling environment in which the building blocks of ESAP2 could flourish. This has been written up by ESAP2 together with external researchers in the paper <a href="http://esap2.org.et/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Rapid-Assessment-SA-Sustainability-and-Instutionalization-March-2016-final1.pdf" target="_blank">“Rapid Assessment of sustainability and institutionalisation of social accountability“</a> (4 page <a href="http://esap2.org.et/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Rapid-Assessment-SA-Institutionalision-summary.pdf" target="_blank">summary</a>). The Ministry of Public Service and Human Development spoke positively about the fit with the good governance agenda, for instance the Citizen’s Charter.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Role of Civil Society Organisations</strong></p>
<p>According to an Irish Aid representative who delivered a closing remark on behalf of the Development Partners, “none of this would have happened without the CSOs”, and that summarised the third and final conference objective: what can we learn from the role of CSOs as interlocutors and CBOs as actors in the social accountability processes? Dr Fletcher Tembo from <a href="http://www.makingallvoicescount.org/" target="_blank">“Making all Voices Count”</a> and <a href="http://www.mwananchi-africa.org/" target="_blank">“Mwananchi”</a> situated social accountability in the context of Ethiopia’s development path and discussed the understanding of the role of civil society (presentation). He explained that ESAP2 has been overcoming collective action challenges by dealing with conflicting incentives and conflicting images or assumptions of reality between citizens and service providers. In a nutshell, the CSOs:</p>
<ul>
<li>Raise citizen awareness of their entitlements to basic public services and how to use tools to engage government officials –build citizenship</li>
<li>Bring together various actors to interface meetings so they can find solutions to the common problem – resolve conflict</li>
<li>Include vulnerable groups </li>
<li>Connect with grassroots groups </li>
<li>Train service providers on how to engage citizens</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Mindsets</strong></p>
<p>In her closing address, a representative of the Ethiopia Roads Authority enthusiastically summarised the role of CSOs from her own perspective: “we are so happy with this program which alleviates our challenges. ESAP2 goes deep: facilitates arbitration, negotiation, and conflict resolution, and has brought a healthier mind-set and mentality to all parties. It strengthens relationships between citizens and government: more love and understanding. Social accountability is the foundation for the democratic development agenda. Please step into our offices wherever you operate - we need to partner more.”</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Sustainability</strong></p>
<p>The National Conference was also attended by international participants that work on Social Accountability. Siapha Kamara, Chief Executive Officer for <a href="http://sendwestafrica.org/" target="_blank">SEND - West Africa</a> is one of these participants. The conference has been a great learning experience for him: “The tools implemented in Ethiopia are few, simple and user friendly. The fact that they are tailored to the service users and their simplicity is a plus as it is empowering. Secondly, the commitment of the Ethiopian government to see social accountability as a tool for good governance and development is really commendable. I have also seen that capacity building has been across the board: for government and civil society organizations. This makes it much easier for them to work together. The program also creates a platform for networking between government and all state actors. Through this initiative, they can build trust on a solid foundation because to have effective social accountability you need to have trust between all stakeholders. I have also seen that a lot of emphasis has been given to capacity building at the grass roots level. For this reason, the potential for the project to be sustainable is quite high.”</p>
<p>Sustainability indeed: as Grandvoinnet et al write in <a href="http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2015/04/17/000333037_20150417113346/Rendered/PDF/958090PUB0seri0PUBLIC09781464804816.pdf" target="_blank">“Opening the Black box”</a> (World Bank 2015, page 196) - “Through this engagement [in social accountability activities], citizens learn to develop a broader perspective, recognize and respect diverse and opposing opinions, and develop a capacity for cooperation and reciprocity—a process that scholars have called “social identification” (Paxton 2007; Putnam 1993; Warren 2001). These effects of participation in collective projects can be enduring: they are “an inheritance people take along with them in their life cycle” (Hooghe 2003) and that they can apply to other domains of public life.”</p>
<p>ESAP2 now moves into a bridging phase towards the next generation of social accountability activities in Ethiopia.</p>Working with the Social Accountability Systemtag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2016-04-02:6394996:BlogPost:153062016-04-02T13:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786591?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786591?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300"></img></a> The ESAP2 Management Agency and the CSOs have “worked with the system”, so that Social Accountability would trigger interest and action among various stakeholders. As a Social Accountability Expert with the ESAP2 MA, I highlighted the key interventions that have developed capacity and generated systems action at the ESAP2 National Conference in Addis Ababa on April…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786591?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786591?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-right"/></a>The ESAP2 Management Agency and the CSOs have “worked with the system”, so that Social Accountability would trigger interest and action among various stakeholders. As a Social Accountability Expert with the ESAP2 MA, I highlighted the key interventions that have developed capacity and generated systems action at the ESAP2 National Conference in Addis Ababa on April 1st. </p>
<p>Now that basic capacities are in place, different support strategies are needed. The cases of Tigray, Amhara and Addis Ababa regional / city councils were presented to illustrate the emerging role of the councils. The audience was also reminded of the SA expert group that co-facilitates the conference with the ESAP2 Management Agency, and the initiative of Jimma University to mainstream Social Accountability in their Community Based Education Program, which are examples of the flexible and adaptive approach the program took to learning and capacity development.</p>
<p>What kind of support is proposed during the bridging phase to further spread social accountability?</p>
<p><br/> <strong>Capacity Development and Training during ESAP2</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>At the start of the grantee projects, they received an induction training to Social Accountability. Initially the focus was on the Social Accountability tools, but this shifted to more focus on the processes of empowerment and working within the local governance system. </li>
<li>The projects received supportive field supervision, which was a major planning exercise as over 100 organisations needed to be supervised. Early on in the program it was decided to organise these visit jointly with the monitoring and evaluation unit (and the grants unit where financial accountability was problematic). The supportive approach, and the interest in organisation and context specific approaches the emerged helped the ESAP2 team to identify trends in terms of what worked, and how challenges were overcome. For instance, staff turn-over in local government can be challenging, but what were partners doing to cope with this reality. We found some partners using, participatory video, which was a creative way to introduce new-comers to Social Accountability. We used this kind of learning to feed the bi-annual learning events we organised (see below).</li>
<li>Initially the interest from the regional MoFEC bureaus was not very high. They felt uninformed and demanded closer collaboration with the Management Agency. This was not simple to organise, as we had a small team and 11 regions to cover. We used our resources wisely, by inviting the bureaus along on our monitoring trips, or briefing them at the end of such trips. At the same time, we worked with MoFEC on a clearer linkage with Financial Transparency and Accountability (FTA), ESAP2’s sister program under the Citizens Engagement component of Promoting \Basic Services Program. We also used one of our learning events as consultation mechanism for MoFEC on the FTA-SA linkage, which materialised shortly after. More recently we saw the BoFEDs report on Social Accountability in the own meetings with the Federal government, to which we were invited.</li>
<li>The bi-annual learning benchmark workshops were large scale multi-stakeholder events that aimed at sharing progress and approaches, and agreeing on critical next steps. Benchmarks were developed from the quarterly project reports: the comparison would trigger discussion. As the projects started to have real service improvement results, and also because we were active on social media, more and more stakeholders were knocking on our door. We were open to all ideas, and this is how ever more stakeholders were invited to the learning events: ESAP2 partners, representatives of Social Accountability Committees, MoFED and regional bureaus, the Charities and Societies Agency, sector ministries, local and regional councils, the Ministry of Civil Service, Development Partners, and universities.</li>
<li>During the learning events, we would also encourage the ESAP2 partners to organise exchange visits among the projects, for which they had some budget.</li>
<li>After each bi-annual learning event we organised the Executive Director’s Day for our partners. Out of this grew the “think tank”, a representation of the directors, which met regularly with the ESAP2 team to reflect on the future of Social Accountability an dthe role of CSOs in it.</li>
<li>Throughout the program, other training was organised, mainly focused on helping us document and learn from the large variety of experiences that were emerging. The reporting quality was poor, so most of our training efforts went into getting better information for learning: Participatory Video (PV)making, Monitoring and Evaluation, and communication methods. This not only supported wider learning, but was also useful locally in the projects. PVs were used for wider awareness raising, mini-research helped woreda sectors realising the impact the projects were having, after the communications training the projects approached the woreda communications unit for support and got a great response that facilitated outreach of the projects. Regional representatives from FTA were invited to many of these trainings, and this helped forge a bond between the regional government and the ESAP2 partners.</li>
<li>We already reported on our communication efforts: Newsletter, Facebook, You Tube and the Communication and Documentation Awards (see pages 12-13). These were not isolated efforts, but served to share what we were learning, to document stakeholder experiences (e.g. the weekly Q&A with a stakeholder on Facebook is a rich resource in terms of understanding the challenges that were overcome on the ground, the successes and views about sustainability), and to get feedback from a wider audience. This is how some of the universities came on board.</li>
<li>Finally, we were always acutely aware of the fact that the Management Agency was a temporary arrangement. We an Ethiopian solution to sustaining Social Accountability expertise. We were always discussing and encouraging our partners and the consultants that worked with us to see this opportunity and envision themselves in a future role. </li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786741?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786741?profile=original" width="593" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Making the ESAP2 Management Agency obsolete</strong></p>
<p>We wanted to know if our efforts to develop capacity and make ourselves obsolete were working, and for this we used Social Network Analysis: a methodology that enables tracking changes in a network. The results clearly showed that in a fairly short time the Social Accountability network grew stronger and less dependent on the ESAP2 Management Agency (illustration on top of the blog). This enables us to now take on a different role in the bridging phase.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Capacity Development for the bridging phase</strong></p>
<p>A number of activities are proposed to further develop capacity of the Social Accountability system, which keeps growing as the picture below illustrates.</p>
<ul>
<li>We have developed key messages for the public on Social Accountability, Financial Transparency and Accountability and Grievance Redress Mechanisms. These messages are in line with each step of the budget and planning cycle of the government. Collaboration with MoFEC and the regions is expected to bring these three programs together and have one unified national communication campaign.</li>
<li>We will study the Social Accountability innovations that our partners develop with local governments in their efforts to deepen Social Accountability in the woredas, to cover at least 50% of all kebeles in the 223 woredas where ESAP2 operated by the end of the bridging phase.</li>
<li>We will further strengthen the capacity of councils to take advantage of Social Accountability processes or even provide leadership to it. Most of this will happen through local level peer exchange, facilitated by the bridging projects.</li>
<li>We will support interested sectors to take advantage of Social Accountability projects, and make investments under the ESAP umbrella, much like the PSNP pilot, which has been extended to 19 woredas under the bridging phase.</li>
<li>We will continue to develop our partnership with the SA expert pool, which has started in preparation for this conference, for the facilitation of learning and project monitoring. We will also explore further with CSO networks and consultants the role they can play in bringing the bridging phase to a successful closure, with a view to continue their roles in the follow-on program.</li>
<li>We will continue to respond to knowledge and research institutes that request our support to introduce them to Social Accountability.</li>
<li>We will continue to contribute to online international bodies of knowledge and forums on Social Accountability, and may attempt to lead an international thematic discussion on issues that pre-occupy us.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>GPSA - forum WDR 2017 Governance and Lawtag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2015-11-23:6394996:BlogPost:152042015-11-23T18:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p>It was with great pleasure that I accepted the request of the Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA) knowledge platform to co-facilitate an <a href="http://gpsaknowledge.org/forums/topic/engaging-with-citizen-voices-and-experiences-the-2017-world-development-report-on-governance-and-the-law/#.VnBZN9L-zIU" target="_blank">e-forum</a> in preparation for the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and Law, lead by Steve Cummins.…</p>
<p></p>
<p>It was with great pleasure that I accepted the request of the Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA) knowledge platform to co-facilitate an <a href="http://gpsaknowledge.org/forums/topic/engaging-with-citizen-voices-and-experiences-the-2017-world-development-report-on-governance-and-the-law/#.VnBZN9L-zIU" target="_blank">e-forum</a> in preparation for the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and Law, lead by Steve Cummins.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786640?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786640?profile=original" width="585" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p>In order not to loose some of my thoughts and contributions to the platform, I am copying a selection of it here, and some of the many interesting responses.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>What does governance mean for you?</strong></p>
<p><span>At the end of this first week, there are a few dimension of governance that I am thinking about, from practice. One is closely related to trust: taxes/user fees/community contribution. I work with the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program (ESAP2). The notion that citizens are paying for their government to serve them has helped, and citizens are actually willing to pay more if it “serves” their purpose.</span><br/><span>Purpose or goal is another dimension of governance that I am thinking about now. There has been a lot of focus so far on inequality, but less on conflict, financial crises, climate change, while these are areas where governance fails to produce good results? Citizens will not engage, unless there is a very clear purpose – or advantage to be gained from participation in governance processes. This engagement may be extra difficult for citizens that have experienced violence from previous governments. In a recent review of our Theater for Social Accountability pilot, one of the actors remembered a woman saying publicly – I have buried 5 children during the Red Terror, so you may imagine that is it hard for me to engage with my government today. Discrimination has similar effects. One of our partners works for social accountability in the agriculture sector, where the Productive Safety Nets Program (PSNP) is hosted. In this case PSNP beneficiaries were referred to as bulldozers, because their labor is used for public works. It doesn’t even occur to PSNP beneficiaries that they have a right to be served with respect, leave alone that they may have something to say about what support would work best for them. If they speak up, they may loose their entitlements all together. In such cases trust can only be build through responsive and meaningful government action, that is respectful and touches peoples’ deep needs. We have all been taken by surprise at what can happen when citizens are organised and manage to truly engage their (local) government at the level of the heart. A human connection emerges that from which a lot becomes possible. That is beyond trust really…</span><br/><a href="http://gpsaknowledge.org/members-2/barb13/" rel="nofollow"><br/></a></p>
<p><strong>A contribution from ESAP colleague Meskerem on unlearning deep rooted behaviour</strong></p>
<p>Indeed I am with you Lucia, people’s experiences and popular thoughts determine citizen’s behaviors to or against real participation which in turn affects the development the right governance in a country. Recently my neighbors and I went to an electric corporation to seek service to which we have paid quite an amount which we should not pay but just to expedite the long process of getting our energy at home. Despite that, after frequent visits of the corporation’s office till this moment, no much progress was gained. Every time with no response, what happens is that we all return to our ways with the usual attitude popular to Ethiopia ‘thou shall not sue a king.. nor do you plow a sky’- to signify that it is impossible for you to ask from higher body. This kind of paradigm has passed from generations to generation that you should not come face to face with an authority. This is why I couldn’t agree more with Fletcher Tambo that we need the real ‘interlocutors’ to unlearn such deep rooted notions and prepare the fertile ground for better governance to flourish.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>If we want change, it requires us to change</strong></p>
<p><span>...“service providers” may have assumptions about how “users” will respond to policies. It reminds me of something I have often heard: our policies do not discriminate, everyone is treated equally. That is certainly the intension most of the time, but different people are not in the same position to take advantage of policies, and some don’t even think it applies to them. There are many female farmers who believe that agricultural services are not for them, because services are not tailored to their specific needs. There is a social group in Ethiopia (potters) who are treated similar to the untouchables in India – they were very surprised to hear that a social protection program also applied to them. They have this mindset that is totally formed by how society views them: an intriguing form of powerlessness. Another example springs to mind – a high school girl that was abducted and gang-raped in Ethiopia, and died of the consequences. her father said: I thought she was my daughter, but I now give her to all of you now – please help so that justice is served and so that this never happens again in our country. The saddest part was that the girl, who died after she was freed, asked her father how she could ever manage to go back to school after this, as if it were her fault. In this case, justice was served, but the mindset shift will take much, much longer to materialise. It is difficult because many people will think “this is not part of our culture” and yet it happens, and when it happens the victims feel guilt. This was not an isolated case. It needs people like the father of the girl, lots of time and courage in society to say – this is in our society – we have to change.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>deliberative democracy</strong></p>
<p>a term used on the e-forum – had to look it up. So for those readers/lurkers who are also unfamiliar with the term, here goes (wikipedia)</p>
<p>“deliberative democracy or discursive democracy is a form of democracy in which deliberation is central to decision-making. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional democratic theory in that authentic deliberation, not mere voting, is the primary source of legitimacy for the law.</p>
<p>Deliberative democracy is compatible with both representative democracy and direct democracy. Some practitioners and theorists use the term to encompass representative bodies whose members authentically deliberate on legislation without unequal distributions of power, while others use the term exclusively to refer to decision-making directly by lay citizens, as in direct democracy.</p>
<p>The term “deliberative democracy” was originally coined by Joseph M. Bessette in his 1980 work “Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government”.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>It's not about challenges, is it?</strong></p>
<p>Whenever I meet social accountability practitioners abroad, they wonder: Social accountability (SA) in Ethiopia, with civil society involvement, really? We all have these boxes in our head – Ethiopia, restrictive NGO environment, political economy similar to Vietnam, etc… So many “challenges” can be named, and yet, we are running the largest single SA investment in Africa, and the results are surprising everyone involved.<br/>I remember early on in the program, some of the CSOs were challenging me – you don’t know Ethiopia, it’s only because of the donors that this program is allowed. And I was thinking – really? This strong government is allowing NGOs to work in close to 30% of its districts, all over the country, just because of donors? My advise was – just sit in that space you have been given and show the difference you can make.<br/>Early on in the program regional governments were challenging us – we don’t know what ‘you’ are up to. And I was thinking – we are implementing a government program in partnership with NGOs. So our question to them was – how can we better inform, collaborate? A year later, colleagues were at a workshop where regional governments were promoting the great work of ESAP.<br/>ESAP is to work at the level of decentralised local government, but certain accountabilities lie at the regional level. Many stakeholders were pointing at the political sensitivities of this. Our question was – who has connections, who can explore? Two years later many service issues (especially water and roads) have been solved through involvement of government levels beyond the district.<br/>Initially concepts of vulnerability were both vague and daunting (e.g in many cases disabled people are hidden from society), but we asked communities ‘who is not (yet) being served?’ and our partners helped local governments to hear the service experience stories of these groups. This has had empowering effects, and has inspired citizens and local governments alike to do more for vulnerable groups with the limited resources available to them.</p>
<p>The practice pattern that seems to work is open mind, connecting with what drives people, and supporting the actions they want to take.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Fletcher Tambo (I shortened it a bit): I would like to comment on the interesting contribution that Lucia made that speaks to the question of ‘how do you address the governance challenges’. Two main points – the first is that working in a context where many researchers and practitioners, based on their analysis, think that you cannot do effective governance work. ESAP has managed to get regional government on board and is managing to get service provision improvements. The second is dealing with language, from the loaded language of ‘vulnerability’ to asking the simple but effective question ‘who is not being served?’ Based on these two observations, my comments are as follows:</p>
<p>a) Having worked on an action research governance programme in Ethiopia (the <a href="http://www.mwananchi-africa.org/" target="_blank">Mwananchi programme</a>) for five years, I noticed a striking difference between Ethiopia and the other five countries. Ethiopia was the only country (it might sound an exaggeration) where government officials at the local level (Zone, Woreda and Kebele) would attend social accountability meetings without too much push. As an action researcher, while I was very happy with this response, I wondered if there was a wider political regime orientation that incentivised this response/behaviour. Having recently done research on Ethiopia at the regime level for the UNECA, I am convinced that there is something there that amounts to what the ODI research findings on the <a href="http://www.odi.org/projects/africa-power-and-politics-programme" target="_blank">Africa Power and Politics Programme</a> (APPP) called ‘policy disciplines’, that works through the bureaucracy that is different from one country to another. This makes me think that while acknowledging the positive local level governance changes and improvements in service provision that comes from it, in the WDR 17 exploration, we need to interrogate where the wider regime incentives, for or against, are coming from.</p>
<p>b) In the case of vocabulary, I know that ESAP in my opinion has done an excellent job in avoiding the loaded, and rather combative demand side language, to a more neutral collaborative one, as implicit in the question ‘who is not being served here?’ as opposed to ‘whose rights are not being demanded, or who is not demanding their rights here?’. I think where as the analytical language of what good governance can be articulated in the broadly understood fundamentals obtained from academic literature, we have to acknowledge that they might not have a universal way of translating them into practice – those who ‘cut’ language from theory and ‘paste’ it wholesome in practice are bound to fail in certain contexts. Unfortunately funded projects look for this universal language to qualify projects, which then affects practice as practitioners strive to look fashionable in their writing by adopting this speak – perhaps this is okay but they should also remember to do things differently in practice.</p>
<p><span>Lastly, the ‘human element’, e.g. volunteering etc that you refer to in the second question is very important, and operates most effectively in localised initiatives, where trust is high and actors obtain a lot of non-monetary rewards from these actions. The disconnect happens when we move from these localised actions to the sub-national and national levels when these local practices are not allowed to inform the sub-national and national practice, mainly because at that level other wider incentives kick in – e.g. strong elite interests colluding with businesses and the way the bureaucracy operates. All these practices are heavily political in nature – so my definition of politics here is not limited to political party contestations but all the different contestations and struggles for access to power and resources characterising society-state relationships in a given country context. As a suggested way to overcome these challenges, I recommend an incremental approach where localised SA practices become ‘policy experiments’ for scaling up to sub-national and national levels through a collective action approach that is based on addressing conflicting incentives. </span></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Good governance becoming a norm...</strong></p>
<p><span>Hi </span><a href="http://gpsaknowledge.org/members-2/joyaceron/" rel="nofollow">@JOYACERON</a><span> , it is great to read more about your work here. I really connect with the idea that good governance would become the norm. In ESAP we have two streams of though: social accountability as a way of life, and social accountability as part of government policies and structures. Probably both need work, but the nature of that work is very different. How do you shift norms in society, so that it can shift the current reality that nobody wants. Culture and norms sit so deep, have been formed over centuries. So I am learning that the responses we know, like "change the law", don’t seem to work. So many reforms have not yielded the results people were looking for. And yet, there are these islands that you write about, and which I also experience, were new norms are emerging. How do we connect with that, enable it to grow, enable it to discover how to change, step by step. I am learning more about this change facilitation work in a MOOC at MIT, with people like Otto Sharmer (theory U) and Peter Senge (the 5th discipline). The MOOC, known as U-lab, is an amazing change experiment with 45,000 plus participants, change facilitators, from all over the world. Governance is one of 8 ‘acupuncture points’ they feel need rethinking and rebuilding. This starts from connecting with with the heart, connecting about what matters. We are so often in our head about big questions, but we are also part of those very same systems that stay the way they are. Anyway – it is too deep to explain in a short comment, but I thought you might find this angle of interest.</span><br/><span>Our ESAP team is currently working with Participatory Video, Theater for Social Accountability, and stories, which are such great instruments, as they mirror what is happening in society, whih can be a real eyeopener. We are adding awards to it, inspired by Galing Pook in your country – isn’t that also a place that creates and connects islands of interesting local government practice?</span></p>
<p></p>
<p>Joy's response: It’s great to hear that you are learning from the Pook experience. Maybe it depends on context, but in the Philippines, given that we have been into ‘best practices’ ‘islands of good governance’ mode for a while, the question of whether these practices and islands are actually getting sustained and making a long-lasting impact not only on their areas but in the country is becoming a pressing issue. For me, we need to go beyond patches and aim for turning good governance a country-wide and if possible a global wide practice, so we stop focusing too much on it and we can move on to more substantive questions of policy content and strategic direction.</p>
<p>Governance, after all, is only the means and the idea of ‘good governance’ provides a framework for such means which assumes to achieve better ends.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Nation building and the role of the international community</strong></p>
<p>In Myanmar, networks of local community organisations emerged under the radar of the previous regime, and they have now begun to bring some real change about. I evaluated an initiative called Paung Ku (bridge) a few years back – and we found examples of local communities now fighting to get back their fishing rights and land rights from previous power holders. It was beginning to be successful, although not without pain. The support to this was a very light touch enabling local communities to connect, for instance mobile phones were provided, and spaces created where communities could meet up on their own agendas. They had bigger fish to fry than basic services – as their livelihoods had been severely affected by the previous regime.</p>
<p>CSOs in Myanmar have observed that the private sector seems to have much more influence on poor peoples lives than all donors and INGOs combined. In that sense, good that the private sector is being brought into development financing and related debates about sustainable growth with equity (have we invited the private sector to this forum?). Yet lack of environmental and labor laws in countries like Myanmar, make that some of the most polluting and exploitative industries in the world seem to be moving there now that the winds of democracy have started to blow. It is interesting to see local groups connecting to this, researching and engaging with the problematic – mostly with their own resources, I may add...</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>vulnerability</strong></p>
<p>The ESAP2 projects in Ethiopia pay special attention in the Social Accountability (SA) process to the needs of vulnerable groups. In our August 2015 quarterly report, we highlighted evidence from the education sector that SA makes a positive contribution for vulnerable groups. As a typical example, in Harari region, Shenkor (APAP), citizens noted through engagement in the SA process that physically challenged children do not have access to wheelchairs; there is a shortage of materials such as braille books for visually impaired children and hence it is difficult for teachers to help them; and finally, there is no schooling for the children with intellectual disabilities. In cases like this, citizens and their local government find context specific solutions (next to solving more generic problems). The following selection of improvements for vulnerable groups was recorded during ESAP2 monitoring visits in the education sector in the second quarter of the year:</p>
<ul>
<li>In Tiro Afeta woreda, citizens observed that here should be a means for visually impaired and hearing impaired children to attend education. Parents do not send their children with disability to school and hence children with disability are discriminated. One citizen, member of the SA committee, explained that he has child with hearing problems. He planned to send his child to school in Addis Ababa, but now that he has seen the change regarding social inclusion, he will send his child to school in the district. The community expressed that they have learned to be more inclusive and “not laugh at or make fun of students with disabilities”. (EMRDA, sub-partner of EIFFDA).</li>
<li>In Asella district, a program for visually impaired has started, and a special needs education teacher was assigned. (AFD, sub partner of SOS Sahel).</li>
<li>In Aisayita, Afar Region, inaccessibility of schools to children with disabilities was solved by the construction of ramps (DEC sub-partner of WCAT).</li>
<li>In Debre Markos, Amhara Region the school compound was transformed to create a disability friendly school. Special needs education started in Abema School, and in the same school a total of Birr 420,000 was endorsed by the local government to relocate local bars and houses inside the school, which was risky to girls and in general disruptive of the teaching-learning process. Inspired by the inclusive SA process, the Mayor office has targeted about 200 poor households that are affected by HIV, and constructed 210 low cost houses worth Birr 6 million for poor households. Community members shared more than half of this budget through their labor and material contribution.</li>
<li>In Oromia Region, Adada district, citizens explained that more girls and disabled students are attending school now. Parents have started to allow their children with disabilities to go to school, and this attitudinal change is the result of SA interventions. The school is more accessible for disabled students, as there are ramps installed. In in Leliso primary school, the government has employed special needs teachers for students who cannot see and hear. (GMEDA, sub-partner of LIA)</li>
<li>In Arada sub city of Adis Ababa a feeding programme was realized in collaboration with citizens and the government for students from poor families, and in the case of Addis Ketema, woreda 7, the first aid room in school is now opened to help girls with menstrual problems.</li>
</ul>
<p>A young SA Committee member, representative for people with disability in Enarj Enawaga district, illustrates the difference SA has made for people like him:</p>
<p>“We were shunned and outcast before the introduction of SA in our area. More than the education, we just wanted to feel the touch of other persons. Feel included. Now we get an education, we feel part of the student body and are included in community discussions.”</p>
<p>There are many concerns and issues that exist in the education sector, like teacher absenteeism, ineffective use of school grants, lack of drink water taps and insufficient toilets for boys and girls. But with quality facilitation that keeps issues of excluded and vulnerable group on the table – among the many other issues, there is a lot of potential for local solutions that address the needs of all.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>Community singingtag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2015-10-08:6394996:BlogPost:144062015-10-08T16:00:35.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786352?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786352?profile=original" width="274"></img></a> I have signed up for <a href="https://uschool.presencing.com/" target="_blank">U.lab</a> - a free online course or MOOC facilitated by Otto Scharmer from <a href="https://www.presencing.com/theoryu" target="_blank">Theory U</a> and more recently <a href="http://www.ottoscharmer.com/publications/books" target="_blank">Leading from the merging future</a>. </p>
<p></p>
<p>In the…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786352?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786352?profile=original" width="274" class="align-right"/></a>I have signed up for <a href="https://uschool.presencing.com/" target="_blank">U.lab</a> - a free online course or MOOC facilitated by Otto Scharmer from <a href="https://www.presencing.com/theoryu" target="_blank">Theory U</a> and more recently <a href="http://www.ottoscharmer.com/publications/books" target="_blank">Leading from the merging future</a>. </p>
<p></p>
<p>In the course, I have joined a coaching circle with a couple of people who happened to have selected the time I was interested in. Our first coaching circle started with community singing – and it was a bonding start.</p>
<p></p>
<p><em>If you give birth to what’s inside you, it will save you, it will save you</em></p>
<p><em>If you don’t give birth to what’s inside you, it will destroy you, it will destroy you</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>What a beautiful case too, focusing on practical environmental education for students. Helping them design for a meaningful life. And all of this towards a vision of connected communities, living locally. The case stirred some powerful images and feelings in me:</p>
<ul>
<li>Dancing and signing around a campfire in Bhutan, where I lived for 5 years, and where belonging to a community and living with respect for nature is still so much part of daily life</li>
<li>My twitter background image of the clay humans embracing each other in a circle – came up when the case giver talked about her team</li>
<li>The cover of <a href="http://www.easycratie.nl/" target="_blank">Easycracy</a> – a book (sorry, it's in Dutch) about networked lives and solutions as an alternative to bureaucracy – came up when the case giver talked about being scared of leaving her job to pursue her calling, but funders taking less interest in higher level systemic change. One of the points the book makes is that social networks make things happen without funding first</li>
<li>A completely incomprehensible chat message my niece send to a friend – youth have such different language – and yet we can find words and connections across generations</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>The generative dialogue brought us from our own attempts (and failures) to live with more respect for each other, for nature, and how this can be a source of connecting with others. …to the power of youth to drive change, of parents to discover and teach new values to their children: we are the first generation that truly understands that we are the cause of all the problems around us. Young parents might be particularly interested in exploring new values they might want to give pass on to their children.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>What an amazing connection we felt among three women sitting in three different continents. Thank you – I look forward to the rest of the coaching journey.</p>Global Partnership for Social Accountability - knowledge platformstag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2015-07-23:6394996:BlogPost:144032015-07-23T10:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p>It's no news: I am a fan of knowledge platforms and online information brokers (see <a href="http://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/data-without-brokers" target="_self">this post</a> for instance). It was therefore rewarding to see that the <a href="http://gpsaknowledge.org/" target="_blank">GPSA knowledge platform</a> noticed me and asked for an <a href="http://esap2.org.et/interview-with-lucia-nass/" target="_blank">interview</a>. Thanks ladies! …</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p>It's no news: I am a fan of knowledge platforms and online information brokers (see <a href="http://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/data-without-brokers" target="_self">this post</a> for instance). It was therefore rewarding to see that the <a href="http://gpsaknowledge.org/" target="_blank">GPSA knowledge platform</a> noticed me and asked for an <a href="http://esap2.org.et/interview-with-lucia-nass/" target="_blank">interview</a>. Thanks ladies! </p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786234?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562786234?profile=original" width="572" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p></p>Ombudsman - the watchdog doesn't always need teethtag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2015-05-11:6394996:BlogPost:138022015-05-11T09:30:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782235?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782235?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="291"></img></a> After the round table about Ombudsman Institutions and their relationship to social accountability at the World Bank, I approached Mr. Danang Girindrawardana, Ombudsman Indonesia to learn more about his relationship with the government. The focus of the round-table questions had rightfully been about reaching out to the most vulnerable in society. Yet it is clear that in some…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782235?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="291" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782235?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="291" class="align-right"/></a>After the round table about Ombudsman Institutions and their relationship to social accountability at the World Bank, I approached Mr. Danang Girindrawardana, Ombudsman Indonesia to learn more about his relationship with the government. The focus of the round-table questions had rightfully been about reaching out to the most vulnerable in society. Yet it is clear that in some societies, the Ombudsman must strike a balance between protecting the poor and holding government to account. As an example, one cannot require the government to provide clean drinking water to all when the resources are just too limited to achieve that in the short run. In this case, the Ombudsman can have all the "teeth" one can hope for, but the result is unlikely to be positive. The role is motivational rather than imposing, and the balancing question seems to be: what is fair and equitable considering the rights and needs on the side of the vulnerable, and the responsibilities and capacities of the government?</p>
<p>It made me think that the watchdog doesn't always need the grow the often called for "teeth" to get the best results for the people. Danang phrased it as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Ombudsman is not the boss of government officials. We approach them with an attitude of collaboration, as we can help solve issues so that performance improves. It is a balancing act between the needs of the poor and the possibilities of government to serve them. The Ombudsman helps the poor, to stand in front of government.</p>
</blockquote>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Role of the Ombudsman in Ireland - Peter Tyndall</strong><br/>In its 30 years of existence, the Ombudsman Ireland supervises public services at national and local - levels. There is no local level ombudsman in this small country. Driven by individual citizens, the Ombudsman looks at one off instance of maladministration in service delivery, and also identifies systemic problems: broader failures of institutes of government. Depending on the nature of complaints, the ombudsman can either directly follow up on the complaint (many problems can be solved through a simple phone call), directly investigate the complaint. or prepare for legislative change (for instance when a law or policy directive has unintended discriminatory effects).</p>
<p>Peter points at the fact that promoting accountability in services should also encompass services that have been delegated to the private sector - such as outsourcing of refuse collection. In such cases citizens can still come to the ombudsman. In Ireland, municipal housing is provided by NGOs, and private nursing homes are also getting government financing. It is important to have redress in such cases as such services target particularly vulnerable people. He believes that specialized Ombudsman Institutions are probably not the way forward, and sees no reason to privatize redress. In some cases contracts or legislation may need to be developed that still require the Ombudsman to have jurisdiction in delegated service provision. Consider the privatization of water services: citizens must be able to complain at an independent, free of charge agency!</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Role of the Ombudsman in Indonesia - Danang Girindrawardana</strong><br/>The Ombudsman focuses on maladministration in public services, as well as the processes of policy making (e.g. 6 months to one year of trial and engaging people, but usually this is usually not respected) and policy implementation, and on behaviour of officials. The Ombudsman handles public complaints, the number of which is growing rapidly in Indonesia, due to more educated and empowered public. The Ombudsman works, among others, through observation of how officials apply the service standards, using an innovative approach, the mystery shopper. Volunteers with a hidden camera and mike shop around for government services, and the findings are presented to government for discussion (officials were made unrecognizable in the clips). In one case this lead to the adoption of a one-stop shop approach to services, overcoming the problems of being send around from one office to the next in a bureaucratic turmoil. In another case, the mystery shopper teams were kept on to keep officials honest and performing.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>How do Ombudsman Institutions promote inclusiveness, and are they inclusive themselves?</strong>Ulrike Grieshofer from the International Ombudsman Institute explains that the Ombudsman should have a low threshold for citizens to participate, for instance in Serbia, elderly people in remote areas participated through local libraries where there is internet access. They could launch a complaint via direct conferencing with the ombudsman in the capital city.</p>
<p>If there are no regional offices there can be consultations days where people can discuss and file complaints. It is often just about listening to the people, and there is not always a proper complaint. In Holland the Ombudsman bus travels around. Sometimes citizens are afraid of complaining, and they rather go to NGOs, so it can be important for the Ombudsman to open up to NGOs. NGOs can also give the Ombudsman a feeling for what is happening on the ground. The Ombudsman in Ireland has contacts with a broad range of CSOs so that various vulnerable people know they can have access to the Ombudsman. Gaia Gozo, governance advisor at CARE explains that CARE-Peru served as an antenna for the Ombudsman. Vulnerable people need NGOs to have better access to the Ombudsman.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>What if the watchdog has no teeth?</strong></p>
<p>Some Ombudsman can impose decisions, and some can only mediate. Ireland can impose requirements, and appeals can only go through court. However in the past 30 years, only 5 Ombudsman recommendations have not been implemented.</p>
<p>Ombudsman is accountable to parliament, not to government, so it can use the power of parliament to hold government to account. The media can also be used to let the people now that government is not responsive.</p>
<p>In Indonesia, the Local Governance act reinforces the role of the ombudsman. It is important to educate the public, especially vulnerable groups, as well at the officials about what the Ombudsman can do for them. Building trust on both sides is essential. Vulnerable groups may be harder to reach with information. Friends of the Ombudsman (i.e. NGOs) do sensitization campaigns around the country. Messages need to be well targeted to the specifics of a group. Danang jokes:</p>
<blockquote><p>It is important to be specific about the basic service standards: there are 32 million smart phones in Indonesia, among 240 million people, but there are not many smart people among them. </p>
</blockquote>
<p></p>
<p></p>Stimulating the Social Accountability movementtag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2015-04-21:6394996:BlogPost:136022015-04-21T15:30:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p>When we were talking about facilitating the last learning event in the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program phase 2 (<a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">ESAP2</a>), we noticed that more and more stakeholders are gradually taking an interest because the program is producing real service improvement results. How to bring relatively new stakeholders on board with those who have already been involved with Social Accountability for two years or more? This workshop needed to help old…</p>
<p>When we were talking about facilitating the last learning event in the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program phase 2 (<a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">ESAP2</a>), we noticed that more and more stakeholders are gradually taking an interest because the program is producing real service improvement results. How to bring relatively new stakeholders on board with those who have already been involved with Social Accountability for two years or more? This workshop needed to help old and new to start moving as one into the future. As workshop facilitators we would be stimulating the SA movement - here are the key facilitation ingredients (with thanks to <a target="_blank">Inigo Retolaza Eguren</a> for reflective support).</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782230?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="350" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782230?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350" class="align-right"/></a></p>
<p><strong>Close your eyes</strong></p>
<p>Inspired by Otto Sharner’s <a href="https://www.presencing.com/ulab/overview" target="_blank">U-Lab</a>, I designed a mindfulness exercise to let people experience the movement they were part of or coming into, and to imagine the potential of that movement for the future. It was an unusual choice in the context of Ethiopia, with a mix of citizens (vulnerable groups!), service providers, government officials, and development partners, most of who are used to very formal workshop settings. But we had done "strange" things before, and my Ethiopian colleagues responded well to the exercise, so we went ahead with it. One of the team developed a perfect translation in Amharic, which is critical as he did not just translate the words, but the cultural meaning of it as well. Due to the mixed nature of the group, we chose to read the mindfulness guidance in two languages – which seemed to work well.</p>
<p>Almost all of the 500 people joined in each exercise. There was something magical about it, really. It is as if we could feel everyone starting to open up a bit and “gel”. Here are some experiences with the exercise, as expressed in learning groups at the end of the first workshop day:</p>
<blockquote><p>It helped all stakeholders in the room to understand social accountability with a full heart, as citizens. Lucia thinks for our community more than we do. We can all think about our attitudes and contributions to our country. We now better understand how SA can contribute to the development of the country, especially in good governance and improving service delivery. It inspired us to work strongly and gave us ideas for sensitizing our neighbours back home. (citizen representatives group) </p>
<p>It made us think about our values and responsibility for the program, about all people as human beings and Ethiopian citizens, and about the living conditions of the grassroots community. It impressed on both service users and providers to develop a sense of belonging, ownership, honesty, sustainability and patriotism towards the community that we belong to. It will help participants to implement the program with total commitment and in a sustainable manner.</p>
</blockquote>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Sector results</strong></p>
<p>In the previous biannual workshops, learning had been around generic SA themes, like mobilisation of vulnerable groups or facilitation of interface meetings. Now that most of the 49 projects are beginning to have service improvement results, we opted to organise sector specific learning. We work in 5 basic public service sectors (education, health, water and sanitation, agriculture and rural roads), and the session started with interviewing a panel of SA innovators – citizens and service providers that achieved remarkable results. Participants then worked in small groups guided by <a href="http://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/learning-by-comparing" target="_self">‘a learning benchmark cluster report’</a> and a set of questions – food for thought.</p>
<p>Next to helping us document more specific service improvements that have been achieved, the session also demonstrated the potential of SA for policy makers. Through SA projects, sectors can get an overview of front line service issues and how local solutions have been found to improve these. Patterns of issues and solutions might point policy makers towards the development of new guidelines, and adjustment of supervision checklists. The SA movement benefits all stakeholders, not just citizens.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Learning/documenting/sharing</strong></p>
<p>At the end of the first day, participants we mixed up to enable cross-sector reflection on learning so far. This happened in communication clinics – where they were supported with a reflection exercise, and then helped to share their SA learning in a creative way. We had 5 clinics: participatory video (staff from 39 partners had already been trained, so there was enough experience in the room), radio, photo story, Most Significant Change story (this is a methodology promoted by ESAP2 as part of quarterly reporting), and theatre for SA (we are piloting this in August 2015 – it’s a form of theatre that engages the audience). Two take-ways for participants:</p>
<ol>
<li>It is not about listing lessons learned, but it is about finding what touched or impressed you, and reflecting why this is important for you. This gets to the heart of meaningful learning.</li>
<li>When meaningful learning is captured in a creative way, it can help to bring others into the learning, in this case: into the SA movement.</li>
</ol>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Empowerment</strong></p>
<p>It is interesting how NGOs may have an experience with one program, but they may not apply it to another program. On the morning of the second day, we created space to learn from the <a href="http://www.cssp-et.org/" target="_blank">Civil Society Support program</a>, which works to “reach the hard to reach”. This helped the ESAP2 partners to review their empowerment strategy. In turn, they also considered how SA principles and practice might be taken into other projects of the organisation.</p>
<p>This session brought home at a deep level that SA is about making services accessible to all citizens, including vulnerable groups. While we could only invite a few representatives of vulnerable groups, the involvement of such groups in the SA movement is crucial for achieving responsive service delivery. Plenary sharing of lessons at the end of each workshop by a representative from vulnerable groups was also moving and inspiring for all. There is nothing more effective than bringing the real world into the workshop!</p>
<blockquote><p>When I closed my eyes at the beginning of the workshop, and thought about beautiful Ethiopia, I could not see myself in it.At the end of this workshop I feel different, because I have sat at the same table with senior government officials. They listened to me and we shared meals together. I cannot begin to tell you what this means for someone like me, so I wrote a poem. (Visually impaired participant, who then read the poem he wrote using braille.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p></p>
<p><strong>World Café</strong></p>
<p>Finally, everyone came together in a <a href="http://www.theworldcafe.com/" target="_blank">World Café</a> to do some forward thinking. There was one session with 3 rounds before lunch on the questions – what will the future with SA look like for you? Who will benefit in what way? The second session with 3 rounds happened after lunch on the questions – what will you do to make it happen? What would you like others to do? Who still needs to come on board of the SA movement?</p>
<p>I captured the richness of this thinking in a <a href="http://esap2.org.et/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/World-Caf%C3%A9-report-learning-benchmarks-February-March-2015.pdf" target="_blank">creative booklet</a> that uses the “table cloths” as illustrations. We will share it in yet another setting – the bi-annual review of Promoting Basic Services, the program of with ESAP2 is part. The meeting will reflect on the future of SA in Ethiopia.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Meanwhile, we will continue to stimulate the SA movement.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782404?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782404?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p><strong>The facilitation team</strong></p>
<p>Top row - Rolf Hunink, Meskerem Grima, Tenaw Mengist, me, Marijke Bos, Tamiru Lega, bottom: Bottom row: Sofia Imam, Abeje Teffera, Sosena Lemma, and Blen Fitsum</p>M&E and learning in logframed programstag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2015-03-27:6394996:BlogPost:133032015-03-27T15:46:15.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782257?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782257?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300"></img></a> I usually find myself working in "logframed" programs, and have become adept at making useful monitoring and learning happen within that context. Here are some of the things I have learned as a non-M&E person:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>it doesn't have to be in the logframe</strong> - if there is a good result, governments and development partners will rarely ask "where does…</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782257?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782257?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-right"/></a>I usually find myself working in "logframed" programs, and have become adept at making useful monitoring and learning happen within that context. Here are some of the things I have learned as a non-M&E person:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>it doesn't have to be in the logframe</strong> - if there is a good result, governments and development partners will rarely ask "where does this sit in the logframe?". So I have long ago stopped feeling boxed or limited by the logframe. I do take an interest, because logframes are a reflection of the thinking at the time a program was designed, but then I move on. As an example, in the logframe of the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program 2 (<a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">ESAP2</a>) there is nothing about the fact that social accountability (SA) needs to have service improvement results. It is all about application of SA tools and approaches, and numbers of people trained. Yet one of my main monitoring questions has been: what difference is this all making in terms of better services for vulnerable groups and women? We have inserted a set of 7 such qualitative questions into the monitoring system, where they serve as a Theory of Change. The head of M&E has recently organised a mini-research to develop an evidence base of the service improvement changes that have happened across 5 sectors in 223 districts of Ethiopia.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>write, shoot and share it widely</strong> - it is not good enough to produce reports for development partners. It is important to get stories out in the open. Stories of experiences that are happening in the program. We do this in many different ways: we have a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/esap2?ref=ts&fref=ts" target="_blank">Facebook page</a> with 4500 followers: Ethiopian development professionals. We share questions that make them think, photos from our monitoring visits, a weekly Q&A with one of the stakeholders, etc. Sometimes they share and ask back. That is how we developed a relationship with one of the Universities in the Country, that is now considering starting a Center of Excellence on SA. When we discovered that our partners were poor writers, we trained those interested in the use of participatory video (PV). Within one year we have 100+ short video clips from stakeholders talking about their experience in their own language (Ethiopia has over 50 different ethnic groups). We have opened a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/ESAP2Channel/playlists" target="_blank">You Tube channel</a> to share all this with a wider audience. When we discovered that the quarterly reports from partners lacked specific details, we introduced Most Significant Change stories. We can see interesting patterns coming out of these stories. To stimulate such documentation and identification of experiences worth sharing we created an <a href="http://esap2.org.et/one-of-the-components-of-protection-of-basic-services-esap2-announces-participatory-video-oscar-winner/" target="_blank">award for best PV</a>, best story and best champions. This helps us capture and share experiences from 116 organisation, working across Ethiopia in 223 districts.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>bring multiple stakeholders together in large scale learning events</strong> - I have learned that <a href="http://www.capacity.org/capacity/opencms/en/journal/issues/facilitating-multi-actor-change.html" target="_blank">capacity emerges in relationships</a>. What really helps is creating the space where people can talk about experiences to other stakeholders, develop a new understanding and take different perspectives into account. I'm not talking about presentations, but about formulation the right questions that trigger sharing and reflection. One approach we use is to benchmark various figures that are anyhow collected in our M&E system (the logframe I referred to above), for instance numbers and types of participants in interface meetings between citizens and their local government. Such graphic comparisons across projects, can be great conversation starters. The trick for these learning events is not to cover too much ground, but to go in-depth. We have 3-4 topics in a two day learning event, and they are all part of one overarching theme. We prepare these topics and the bi-annual theme with our monitoring team, people that go out regularly to visit projects to learn from what is happening and to provide on-the-job support where needed. We regularly take half a day or so to talk about what has been striking us in these visits. This drives the formulation of questions and the theme to explore.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><strong>be very selective with tactical technical inputs</strong> - It is important that stakeholders in a program also get new insights or "food for thought" that helps them take a step back, develop a reflective stance on they way they are approaching an issue. To break through the initial "toolification" of social accountability in Ethiopia, I tried to bring out the process that appeared to happen, and facilitated reflection on how different stakeholders were differently engaged in this process. (Theme: citizens in the drivers seat) The next step was to work on new notions of power, for which we used a power analysis tool. (Theme: the right people on board) More recently, we started looking into the future. We organised a mindful exercise in which various stakeholders were helped to "feel each other, the relationships and the tensions in the room". This created an atmosphere in which vulnerable person could sit at the table with a senior government official and have a helpful conversation. (Theme: stimulating the SA movement) Because these learning events are large scale - 500 to sometimes 750 people from across Ethiopia are brought together every 6 months, the themes of the learning events start to "buzz" around the country.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>This blog was inspired by a blog in <a href="http://doingdevelopmentdifferently.com/" target="_blank">Doing Development Differently</a> - <a href="http://doingdevelopmentdifferently.com/forums/topic/monitoring-and-learning-in-politically-smart-adaptive-programmes/" target="_blank">Monitoring and learning in politically smart, adaptive programmes</a>.</p>Power - a reminder from Dublintag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2014-08-24:6394996:BlogPost:125042014-08-24T13:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781798?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781798?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300"></img></a> At the end of a content packed workshop on <a href="http://christianaid.typepad.com/learningexchange/governance-workshop.html" target="_blank">Governance, Accountability & Citizen Empowerment</a> in Dublin (June 2014), I knew what I wanted to do with partners in the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program (…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781798?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="300" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781798?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="300" class="align-right"/></a>At the end of a content packed workshop on <a href="http://christianaid.typepad.com/learningexchange/governance-workshop.html" target="_blank">Governance, Accountability & Citizen Empowerment</a> in Dublin (June 2014), I knew what I wanted to do with partners in the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program (<a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">ESAP2</a>).</p>
<p>Partners have become better at linking up with existing community organisations and make use of traditional media to spread the social accountability messages - but are they thinking strategically enough about the relationships they are forging for citizens to become and stay more influential through social accountability processes?</p>
<p>Some time ago, I was quite shocked to learn that many of the Social Accountability Committees at district level were dominated by local government officials. Surely that missed the whole point of Social Accountability? How can citizens hold government to account if they are not present at district level?</p>
<p>I guess it was one of those things that happen in large programs - new concepts like Social Accountability can easily loose their essence when you don't pay attention. Fortunately, we did pay attention and managed to shift things around fairly quickly with our "citizens in the driver's seat" slogan (read more about it in the <a href="http://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/citizen-engagement-for-improved-basic-services-in-ethiopia" target="_self">blog about challenges</a>).</p>
<p>Citizens are again in the driver's seat of Social Accountability, but how firmly are they seated? There are two main strategies we see partner take when it comes to rooting Social Accountability among citizens:</p>
<ul>
<li>linking up with existing organisation - popular links are with Iddir (traditional burial associations with large memberships and with influential leaders), and mass based organisations (like youth, women and farmers associations), but also Parent-Teacher Associations, and Water User Committees are among the favorites.The idea is that when these organisations bring Social Accountability on board - they can mobilize lots of citizens to build up the service assessment evidence base.</li>
<li>making use of traditional media - societies in Ethiopia have developed interesting mechanisms through which all citizens can be reached and/or heard. In Afar region there is "dagu" the obligation to share news with others when you meet them on the way. In Sidama area there is "ware" daily meetings at one of the houses of the elders where important issues are discussed. The idea is that through such media, Social Accountability messages can spread, or the need to engage for service improvements can be initiated.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>The question is - how influential are these existing organisations and traditional media when it comes to service improvements. Do the really have the needs of vulnerable groups in society at heart?</p>
<p></p>
<p>With this question in mind, we introduced "new notions of power" from the <a href="http://www.powercube.net/" target="_blank">powercube</a> (also see this <a href="http://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/empowerment-and-civil-society-concepts-in-myanmar" target="_self">blog about empowerment</a>) and facilitated an exercise "empowerment matrix" - aimed at developing or rethinking empowerment strategies.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562784909?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="400" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562784909?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="400" class="align-center"/></a></p>
<p> Partners identify persons and organisation they work with (on cards), and discuss: Is this person / organisation influential in the sector? How important is service improvement for this person/organisation? The then place the card in the matrix.</p>
<p></p>
<p>They use the following questions to reflect on the matrix:</p>
<ul>
<li>Which interests and needs does the sector meet?</li>
<li>What is your empowerment strategy?</li>
<li>What changes do you want to make in your project after this exercise?</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>The discussions were heated, but worthwhile, as partners gain a host of insights from working with the empowerment matrix, some of which are summarized here:</p>
<ul>
<li>There is a need for more awareness creation about roles, mandates, responsibilities and working policies among all stakeholders, so that the enabling environment for citizen participation can be improved.</li>
<li>The high officials from the City Administration, council and other important and influential sectors and Community Based Organisations need to be brought on board. They need further awareness on SA concepts and results, so that they can more fully support and enable it.</li>
<li>Engaging the CBOs, women and others who are high on importance but low on influence, so that they can be strong together to make their voice heard; and experience sharing for these groups between woredas.</li>
<li>Empower vulnerable groups by linking them with those who have high interest and high influence, so that they can make the voice of vulnerable groups heard in decision making.</li>
<li>We need to work more with Iddir (Southern Nations and Nationalities and Peoples Region)/ development army (Amhara region), because they have links with different social groups, and they have influential leaders.</li>
<li>Build the capacity of CBOs to influence the service providers more, and of women’s affairs to play a more influential role in the council on gender issues.</li>
<li>Motivate influential people who achieve good service improvement results by giving acknowledgement and by celebrating their efforts.</li>
<li>Improve relationships between citizens/CBOs and front line service providers, so that they can be influential together.</li>
<li>Work with Planning and Finance and other government sectors to more actively promote quality service delivery, because they are mandated to provide quality services.</li>
<li>Report regularly to the Council, and strengthen their role, because they are supposed to keep Social Accountability on the agenda of government basic service offices.</li>
<li>Make an exhaustive identification of influential stakeholders and inquire about their interest and motivation to support vulnerable groups in their quest for service improvements. Plan an empowerment strategy based on this assessment. Follow an independent strategy for each stakeholder.</li>
</ul>Gender Analysis and Influencing Budgets - at the heart of Social Accountabilitytag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2014-07-31:6394996:BlogPost:127062014-07-31T12:00:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782032?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782032?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="250"></img></a> When we were updating the <a href="http://esap2.org.et/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Final-_Tools_GRB-31-July-2014-without-covers.pdf" target="_blank">Gender Responsive Budget tool</a> (GRB) for <a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">ESAP2</a> partners it struck me again how fundamental the combination of gender analysis and influencing budgets is for an inclusive and…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782032?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="250" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782032?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="250" class="align-right"/></a>When we were updating the <a href="http://esap2.org.et/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Final-_Tools_GRB-31-July-2014-without-covers.pdf" target="_blank">Gender Responsive Budget tool</a> (GRB) for <a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">ESAP2</a> partners it struck me again how fundamental the combination of gender analysis and influencing budgets is for an inclusive and effective approach to social accountability.</p>
<p>In the process of updating the GRB tool, we had a redesign workshop with some partners who were interested to work with the tool. They missed a clear step approach in the previous version of the tool - and were therefore finding it hard to use GRB with citizens. We managed to boil the tool down to something that would give good results at the local level: basic service budgets that work for women too.</p>
<p></p>
<p>During the workshop, we realized two things:</p>
<ol>
<li>social accountability tools like Citizen Score Cards, inevitably lead to the identification of service improvements that have budget implications</li>
<li>social accountability tools are not necessarily gender sensitive - e.g. our partners form Focus Groups of vulnerable segments of society, and this includes a group of women, but gender is an issue across vulnerable groups, and not all women are vulnerable.</li>
</ol>
<p></p>
<p>We concluded that the best way to bring women's issues to bear on the district budget would be to mainstream gender budgeting into all the other SA tools that we are promoting. Our new GRB tool does exactly that - in a few clear steps:</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562785048?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="350" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562785048?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350" class="align-center"/></a></p>
<p><br/> The most interesting is step 4, which makes gender analysis an integral part of Social Accountability. At the local level it can be challenging to make women's voices heard among those of men. However, experience shows that men are often inclined to change their priorities for service improvements once they have heard the stories of women. I love the following example shared by one of our partners:</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562785328?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562785328?profile=original" width="452" class="align-center"/></a>(chat or khat is a leaf, and chat chewing is a social custom in this area of Ethiopia)</p>
<p></p>
<p>We are pleased to see that partners now have a clear plan to use the updated GRB tool in order to get better service improvement results for women. Tadelech Debele, our GRB consultant (in the intro picture on the top of this blog), is following them and will produce case studies in a couple of months.</p>Citizen Engagement for improved basic services in Ethiopiatag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2014-06-09:6394996:BlogPost:127022014-06-09T10:30:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781738?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781738?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="250"></img></a> This paper was prepared for the <a href="http://christianaid.typepad.com/learningexchange/governance-workshop.html" target="_blank">Governance, Accountability & Citizens' Empowerment workshop</a> in Dublin together with Tamiru Lega Berhe (<a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">ESAP2</a>) and Tamrat Getahun Woldemichael (…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781738?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="250" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781738?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="250" class="align-right"/></a>This paper was prepared for the <a href="http://christianaid.typepad.com/learningexchange/governance-workshop.html" target="_blank">Governance, Accountability & Citizens' Empowerment workshop</a> in Dublin together with Tamiru Lega Berhe (<a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">ESAP2</a>) and Tamrat Getahun Woldemichael (<a href="http://www.kmg-ethiopia.org/" target="_blank">KMG-Ethiopia</a>). The paper can also be downloaded <a href="http://christianaid.typepad.com/files/citizen-engagement-for-improved-basic-services-ethiopia-handout.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Citizens Engagement for Improved Basic Services in Ethiopia</strong></p>
<p>The Ethiopia Social Accountability Program, or ESAP2, is a multi-donor trust fund for grant making and capacity development. It is part of the Citizens Engagement component of a broader government program known as PBS - Promoting Basic Services.</p>
<p>The complementarity between the 3 programs under the Citizens’ Engagement component of PBS: Financial Transparency and Accountability (FTA), ESAP2 and Grievance Redress Mechanism (GRM) is as follows:</p>
<ul>
<li>FTA develops local government capacity to make service standards, plans and budgets available to citizens, and educates citizens on budget literacy.</li>
<li>ESAP enables Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to work with citizens to assess the service situation based on the information made available by their local government. </li>
<li>ESAP enables CSOs to monitor the response of service providers to service issues raised by citizens.</li>
<li>GRM handles individual grievances or grievances of specific groups of service users, which are not satisfactorily handled by service providers.</li>
</ul>
<p>FTA already covers all 900+ districts in the country, and there is a collaborative practice between FTA and ESAP in the districts where ESAP operates. The development of GRM has just started.</p>
<p>The 49 grantees of ESAP2 each work on two year projects in 3 to 5 districts. Some partners work with sub-grantees, so a total of 107 Ethiopian organisations are currently facilitating social accountability in 5 basic public service sectors, covering over 25% all districts in the country, across all 11 diverse regions of the country.</p>
<p>We will present three key challenges, and discuss what we have done in the ESAP2 Capacity Development and Training team to overcome these.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Challenge 1 - Toolification</strong></p>
<p>Our first challenge is related to an initial focus on social accountability Tools, which made it difficult for our partners to make a good start with their two year project.</p>
<p>Social accountability starts with mobilisation and awareness raising of citizens and service providers, and it is critical to get all stakeholders on board and to begin to build commitment and relationships among:</p>
<ul>
<li>Citizens, with an eye for diversity in terms of social and vulnerable groups</li>
<li>Local leaders and their community based organisations</li>
<li>Local government and their service providers</li>
<li>Elected councillors</li>
</ul>
<p>We quickly discovered that more guidance was needed to making a good start – and a good finish for that matter: working towards sustainability of Social Accountability, but more about that later.</p>
<p>We responded in two ways: we gradually designed a social accountability process, and we developed thoughts on how the SA tools might be combined over time.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781952?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="400" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781952?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="400" class="align-center"/></a></p>
<p>As this slide shows, the initial focus on SA tools was only one piece of the SA process puzzle. For instance, partners would ask us how to conduct and interface meeting, and what they would do after the interface meeting when the tool was “done”.</p>
<p>With the second batch of 19 grantees, we have introduced the notion that SA is a process:</p>
<ul>
<li>The SA process starts with access to information about service standards, plans and budgets; partners make sure that citizens have the confidence and build the relationships that help them to ask for information (Note that FTA helps government to provide such information, as we have seen in the first slide)</li>
<li>Based on this information citizens can assess the service situation compared to the standard/plan/budget; partners enable service users and providers to use SA tools to assess the service situation from various perspectives (e.g. vulnerable groups may have different needs) – the tools help to build an evidence base of needs and priorities of citizens</li>
<li>When the assessment is complete, interface meetings are organised to facilitate a dialogue about the service situation, to identify local solutions, and to agree among all stakeholders on joint actions (= reform agenda)</li>
<li>A Joint Action Plan is implemented as agreed between users, providers and woreda officials during the interface meeting</li>
<li>Citizens then monitor the improvements and when required start the SA process again.</li>
</ul>
<p>The SA process includes an overview of roles of various stakeholders at each step of the process (See: table at the end ).</p>
<p>We noticed that some of our partners do not fully understand the different roles and responsibilities of stakeholders and their accountability relationships. In a nutshell:</p>
<ul>
<li>The service standards, budgets and plans are approved by the district council, usually within a framework set by Regional or Federal parliament. </li>
<li>Based on this approval, the district administration and sectors execute plans and deliver services. The district administration delegates day-to-day implementation to service providers (schools, clinics etc).</li>
<li>Citizens also have responsibilities such as paying fees where these are due, or reporting problems, e.g. when the water system has stopped functioning properly, or when a teacher is not showing up at school.</li>
</ul>
<p>Because service delivery is delegated, the first step in social accountability is from citizens to the (sub-district level) service providers, like teachers, health and agricultural extension workers, water supply and road maintenance committees. Are they delivering services as approved?</p>
<p>In case the service issue cannot be resolved at that level, the second step is to the district administration/sectors. Are they delegating as approved? Are they making sure that service providers can do a good job, by providing approved resources and support?</p>
<p>With social accountability in Ethiopia, citizens are supported to hold service providers accountable, and to go up to the district if needed.</p>
<p>The district councils (local parliament) will control if government executes the standards and plans as per what was approved. The council can do this through a direct link with the citizens, for instance by participating in the social accountability process: where citizens hold service providers to account.</p>
<p>We can see this <strong>tripartite structure of accountability relationships</strong> back in the composition of the SA Committee. More about this committee in a moment.</p>
<p>ESAP2 partners, civil society organisation, aim to make these accountability relationships functional through education and process facilitation.</p>
<p>Some of the challenges noted in this regard are:</p>
<ul>
<li>High government official turnover</li>
<li>Some political leaders lack commitment and have their own priorities</li>
</ul>
<p>Next to designing the social accountability process, and working out the roles of each stakeholders, we also had a closer look at how the SA tools were used by our partners.</p>
<p>We noticed that most of our partners had selected Community Score Card (CSC) and Participatory Planning and Budgeting (PPB). Partners found that our Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) tool was not very practical, and we were discussing if they could use GRB principles to enrich the PPB process. Later, when we were developing the PETS tool, we realized that it could be seen as a tool with which citizens could monitor service improvements or budget allocations that were agreed earlier on in the SA process when the CSC or Citizen Report Card survey was used. PETS can of course be used for assessment, but this is usually not where CSO’s and citizens in Ethiopia choose to start the SA process.</p>
<p>These findings inspired us to think about the tools in a slightly different manner:</p>
<ul>
<li>There are tools to assess the services (e.g. CSC and CRC), and </li>
<li>There are tools to influence government processes through which services are planned/budgeted and executed (PPB, GRB). If citizens want to be influential, they best plan their SA interventions in line with the government budget process.</li>
<li>And there are tools that help to monitor service improvements, for instance: Community mapping can be used to understand and monitor the service situation; Social audit can be used to monitor citizen satisfaction with the improvements; PETS can be used to monitor if agreed budgets are executed as intended; or if books and medicines reach as intended.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>One partner explained it as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>through the community score card people are educated about their rights as well as their responsibilities. When they start considering the mobilisation of resources for service improvements, it occurs to them that they need to understand the sector budget. When issues are beyond the community resources to deal with, they can ask for future assistance from the Woreda budget. The participatory planning and budgeting tool facilitates this process.</p>
</blockquote>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Challenge 2 - the right people on board</strong></p>
<p>Our second challenge is the contextualized identification of vulnerable groups and their inclusion in the SA process.</p>
<p>We promote inclusion of vulnerable groups in the SA process. The challenge was that the concept of vulnerability (women, youth, elders, people living with HIV-AIDS or with disability) was not always well contextualized to the situation in the district, or the sector. For instance, food insecure households were not identified as a specific vulnerable group in agriculture. Also, partners felt they had to target PLWHA or physically challenged people even-though they had no contextualised understanding of why this would be important. Thus we could find PLWHA were participating in the assessment of the agricultural sector, but they were not users of agriculture services.</p>
<p>Related to this was the empowerment of vulnerable groups and their involvement in the SA committee, the tri-partite structure we briefly hinted at in a previous slide. In Ethiopia, SA is driven by the government, so local government wants to be firmly represented in the SA Committee (SAC). They see it as part and parcel of the good governance agenda of the federal government. Yet it is important that various social and vulnerable groups are in the majority, otherwise the whole idea of Social Accountability is lost (i.e. government already has systems to hold itself accountable). However, due to pressure of local government to be on the committee, and also other considerations, for instance "with local government on the SAC the SA process can be sustained"; or "citizens find it difficult to attend frequent, far away meetings in the district capital"; a situation had grown were most SA committees at district level were either dominated or complete composed of government staff.</p>
<p>This issue was on top of our first learning agenda last February 2014, under the slogan: “citizens in the driver’s seat”. We are pleased to report that the composition of SACs has drastically changed since then.</p>
<p><strong>What is the SAC?</strong> The SA Committee facilitates the SA process, with support from our partners for a period of two years. The SAC is a tri-partite structure that brings together representatives of citizens in various social and vulnerable groups, service providers (and their administrators) and elected council members.</p>
<p>Why not just citizens in the SAC, you may wonder? In the pilot phase of ESAP1, the tri-partite composition proved to enable trust building and to facilitate dialogue from the start of the SA process.</p>
<p>Apart from us making majority citizen membership a major point during the learning benchmark meetings, two things appear to have facilitated the drastic change away from government domination in the SAC. First of all, most projects were at the interface meeting stage, and this seemed a good time to simply elected a new SAC to monitor service improvement agreements. Secondly, to convince the local government that citizens should be in the majority, the partners explained that an all government SAC looks like an internal accountability mechanisms, and misses the point of citizens holding government to account. Local government is beginning to like social accountability, because it solves local service problems and mobilizes local resources like never before. They understand it better now, some time into the process.</p>
<p>So, now there is a better representation of diverse social and vulnerable groups, not just during the tool application, and in the sub-district SAC, but also also in the district level SA Committee.</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Challenge 3 - Scaling and sustaining</strong></p>
<p>Our third challenge is the scaling and sustainability of the SA process and the SAC</p>
<p>Partners work in 3 kebeles (sub-districts) per district, but there are actually many more sub-districts per district, up to 25 or more. We encourage partners to disseminate SA messages beyond these 3 kebeles, but there is little experience on how to do this well. There is also little evidence to suggest that in Ethiopia citizens will take up an SA process on their own. So one of the questions is how the district SAC can gradually loop other Kebeles into the SA process. Can this be driven by service providers?</p>
<p>The SAC is to be sustained from local resources – Indeed, there are SACs from the pilot phase that are still functioning without external support, but we must further study these cases to understand the conditions in which this can happen.</p>
<p>Moreover, sustaining the SAC locally points in the direction of mainstreaming SA processes into existing structures and organisations (e.g. ICBPP, and mass based organisation having representation in the SA process as part of their duties). We are building an action-research agenda to support SA mainstreaming.</p>
<p>There is also a longer term dimension to sustainability. The attitudinal changes that we are aiming for are so great that it will require many, many years of awareness raising and process facilitation in one way or the other before SA can become a way of life. In Indonesia for instance, it took 15 years to develop and sustain mature dialogue capacities between citizens and their local government. Such a long term investment requires a sustained commitment from government to keep investing in civil society facilitation of awareness and dialogues.</p>
<p>We have four key strategies to build commitment for this, which can be summarized as follows:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Project sustainability:</strong> Each of the partner projects aims to develop local capacity to sustain the SA process over time. At the heart of this strategy is the SAC, but critical for sustainability is that the SAC links with traditional structures and existing community based organisations. Much of the project efforts go into “ongoing sensitization”, all kinds of SA awareness raising and progress update meetings organised by CBOs among their membership. The idea is that SA would become part of regular duties of as many citizen organisations as possible, and that the SAC serves as the bridge between citizens and citizens groups with service providers and local government.</li>
<li><strong>Social Media and other media:</strong> although citizens have very limited access to Social Media, most CSOs and Government offices do have such access. We use social media to actively target this group with a Facebook page - close to 2000 Ethiopian followers, many of which are young female professionals. We have also trained interested partners in the use of Participatory Video (PV) – so that there is access to examples of voice and service improvements. The PVs are available on the ESAP2 YouTube Channel. The PVs are also used to support community dialogues, and to document/monitor project progress. We are also on Twitter, but not yet very active. We feel twitter will become more interesting once a wider, academic and NGO audience starts to take an interest in our work. Next to this we produce a quarterly newsletter in English and Amhara (hard and soft), which you can subscribe to on our website.</li>
<li><strong>Peer learning</strong>, not just among the CSOs that facilitate the process and their peers in civil society, but also among the SACs. Our main activity is bi-annual learning benchmarks in which project progress and results are compared to trigger learning. We are now decentralising these events to regions, so that representatives from SAC and interested NGOs can participate. </li>
<li><strong>Networks and hubs:</strong> The MA is currently providing all capacity development and training support, but some of our partners are in a position to develop capacities of others, and to mainstream SA in their other projects. For the next phase, we envisage that the MA would shift roles to “capacitate the capacity developers” / and to structure learning and research agendas (again possibly in collaboration with one or more local partners). We are already working towards that (e.g. Social Network Analysis report).</li>
</ul>
<p>Widening the space is all about networking, and about feeding people and organisations that can influence the political process, such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Partners presenting good practices/results at the local NGO-GO forums</li>
<li>Keeping our Steering Committee (chaired by the State Minister of MOFED, and with participants from CSO-networks and donors) actively informed</li>
<li>Debriefing regional BOFEDs at every monitoring trip – inviting them to our learning benchmarks, linking actively with FTA, etc.</li>
<li>Coordination and sharing with other Civil Society grant makers, and liaising with the donor groups such as the Transparency and Accountability Group – looking for opportunities to mainstream social accountability.</li>
<li>We have also planned a national conference next year to reach the federal sector ministries.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Does the social accountability process lead to service improvements?</strong></p>
<p>Although it is early days, from the Joint Action Plans in 80 districts we can distill a number of service improvements results, which are summarized here:</p>
<ul>
<li>Citizens are beginning to get better services as per their priorities – this includes being treated with dignity even though they are poor</li>
<li>Citizens are contributing to make this happen – they invest with their own resources and labour to get the services they want</li>
<li>Local Governments are beginning to use existing resources more effectively –execute budgets without delay, and re-allocate resources to where the needs are highest</li>
</ul>
<p>Below some sector specific examples are provided of service improvements that have already been realized although the projects are still ongoing.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Education sector –</strong> Examples of service improvements: Community – financial, material and labor contributions for toilet blocks (boys and girls), new class rooms, teacher and student shelters/dining rooms, and school fencing; Service providers/local government – hiring teachers as per standard/budget provisions; pay for class room roofing; lobby private sector to level school grounds; improve water supply; take books out of the store rooms into the schools</li>
<li><strong>Health sector –</strong> Examples of service improvements: Communities – keep villages clean; NGOs - allocate resources to equip health center; Service providers/local government – treat patients with respect, e.g. confidentiality for women and youth using FP/RH services; Clean delivery rooms; Increased drugs budget; availability of drugs; Reduced staff turn-over; new staff appointed (including guards and cleaners); Expansion of the health centers to admit more in- patients</li>
<li><strong>Rural Roads sector:</strong> Community – financial and labor contributions to improve roads (e.g. 132,000 ETB, 238 people); monitor construction of new roads according to the standard; Local government: make better, sustainable investments and achieve more kms in cooperation with SAC and community (e.g. URRAP resources reallocated); assign engineers to work with community on road maintenance</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Key functions and stakeholder roles in the ESAP2 Social Accountability process</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781948?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="550" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781948?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="550" class="align-full"/></a></strong></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>Capacity develops in interactions and relationshipstag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2014-05-02:6394996:BlogPost:116282014-05-02T11:30:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781808?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781808?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="250"></img></a> A Social Accountability practitioner was arguing the other day that citizens needed their own space to reflect on service issues, and should be protected from political and government interference during that process. In his view, citizens need to be empowered first. While I certainly agree that citizens need their own spaces, I strongly disagree that citizens can be…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781808?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="250" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562781808?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="250" class="align-right"/></a>A Social Accountability practitioner was arguing the other day that citizens needed their own space to reflect on service issues, and should be protected from political and government interference during that process. In his view, citizens need to be empowered first. While I certainly agree that citizens need their own spaces, I strongly disagree that citizens can be empowered in isolation from the politics and administrative agendas that surround them. It is in fact through engaging with politicians and administrators that citizen capacities will develop.</p>
<p>During the same monitoring trip in Ethiopia, a disabled person told me, with sparkles in his eyes, that it was the first time for him to attend a public meeting. You could "see" that he developed more confidence, just from the fact that he had been considered as a person like everyone else. He had been invited to say something during the meeting, and people had actually listened. There is no training in the world that can have this empowering effect. Not only did he begin to see himself in a different light, just because he had been invited to a public meeting, but others in the meeting also had a very different experience: a disabled person who actually makes a contribution. That had never been seen before.</p>
<p>This is why it is so critical to design capacity development strategies that enable different parties to engage with each other: a lot of capacity develops through interaction between actors. You can teach citizens about an interface meeting in which they can have a dialogue with service providers about improvements they would like to see, but the real capacity develops from actually participating in such a meeting, and getting a good result. Or getting a bad result for that matter, and wondering what should have been done differently. The most important role of Social Accountability practitioners in Ethiopia is to enable interactions between citiznes, government and council to take place, and to help each of these stakeholders make sense of what happens in those interactions.</p>Social Accountability in Ethiopia – learning by doingtag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2014-03-30:6394996:BlogPost:115832014-03-30T10:30:00.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562783855?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562783855?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350"></img></a> Tomorrow, we are hosting a meeting with over 100 Executive Directors of NGOs in Ethiopia. The NGOs are grantees and their sub-partners of the <a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">Ethiopia Social Accountability Programme 2</a> (World Bank multi donor trust fund of about 25 million USD). The Executive Directors’ Day (EDD) will discuss Social Accountability now and in…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562783855?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="350" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562783855?profile=RESIZE_480x480" width="350" class="align-right"/></a>Tomorrow, we are hosting a meeting with over 100 Executive Directors of NGOs in Ethiopia. The NGOs are grantees and their sub-partners of the <a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">Ethiopia Social Accountability Programme 2</a> (World Bank multi donor trust fund of about 25 million USD). The Executive Directors’ Day (EDD) will discuss Social Accountability now and in the future. I had hoped to relax today to be fresh for tomorrow’s facilitation, but then I stumbled upon a digital presentation: <a href="http://issuu.com/thegpsa/docs/social-accountability-04-13" target="_blank">Social Accountability – What does the evidence really say?</a> (Jonathan Fox) by the <a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/CSO/0,,contentMDK:23017716~pagePK:220503~piPK:220476~theSitePK:228717,00.html" target="_blank">Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA)</a>, and I couldn’t resist the urge to read it. (Picture: meeting with a Social Accountability Committee at the office of a District Administrator in Tigray Region of Ethiopia)</p>
<p>The conclusion of the presentation raises key issues for further research and learning by doing, some of which I use here for my reflection.</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Evidence shows that:</strong></li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li><em>Information is not enough</em> – ESAP2 grantees facilitate direct interactions between citizens and front line service providers. Citizens access information about service standards, plans and budgets. Citizens and service providers use a variety of Social Accountability tools to identify service gaps. The findings are shared at an interface meeting, where citizens present their findings and service providers discuss these findings. The aim of the interface meeting is to develop a reform agenda, also known as joint action plan, where both service providers and citizens agree on what needs to be done to improve the service. </li>
</ul>
<blockquote><p><em><strong>An example:</strong></em> In a district in Tigray Region, about 50 kms from the regional capital Mekele, the Tigray Youth Association has enabled citizens to assess the conditions of their rural roads using a community score card tool. Citizens discovered that the roads are too narrow compared to the standard and very poorly maintained. They also learned about their entitlement to an all-weather road that links their ‘tabia’ (sub-district) with the district capital. During the interface meeting at sub-district level, the district administrator was invited. When he saw the commitment of citizens to contribute labour and other resources as long as the standards would be met and the entitlement realised, he immediately agreed to send an engineer to redesign damaged parts of the rural roads. Meanwhile, he has checked his budget from the Universal Rural Access Program. Resources have now been reallocated, because the local government realises it can do a lot more if it works in coordination with citizens to satisfy their needs.</p>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li><em>Strategic Social Accountability bolsters enabling environment for collective action, scale up and brings government response in</em> – ESAP2 has recently linked-up with the Financial Transparency and Accountability programme (FTA) that enables local governments to display budgets and make other local government information available to citizens. Together with the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MoFED) a consultation was hosted with all ESAP2 project staff of 49 grantees and their sub-partners, as well as 3 officials from each of the 11 regional bureaus of MoFED. Over 350 participants reflected on possibilities for linkages, based on the four step Social Accountability process that ESAP2 promotes. This event strengthened and forged new relationships between the government and civil society. A proposal for policy guidance to local governments has been submitted for MoFED approval shortly after the event.</li>
</ul>
<p>This practice fits with the suggestion in the GPSA presentation that SA interventions should seek to <strong>bridge state-society relationships for synergy</strong>. ESAP2 brings supply – the provision of services, and demand – the call for accountability, together. The bridge is not just at the citizen – service provider interface at the level of sub-district and district local government, but also at higher – programme and government – levels, e.g. through the link with FTA and PSNP (see below), as well as horizontal (e.g. the district council is also a member of the SA Committee).</p>
<p><br/> The GPSA presentation raises two issues that are closely related to our EDD agenda tomorrow:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>How does the political economy of cross-sectoral coalition building work?</em> – This is a thick, long term question for Social Accountability in Ethiopia. ESAP2 is building evidence at scale that Social Accountability works to improve the quality of basic services in 5 sectors (education, health, agriculture, water and sanitation, and rural roads). Projects typically start in one sector that is prone to complaints or that is otherwise a priority for citizens. The assumption is that SA committees, which learn to work with at least two SA tools, can gradually spread out to other sectors, but it is not clear yet if and how this will work in practice. ESAP2 works closely with MoFED, but is only starting to engage with sector line ministries. For instance, very recently, the Ministry of Agriculture and MoFED have requested ESAP2 to link with the Productive Safety Nets Program (PSNP), for which many local governments have significant budget. The aim of the linkage it to learn for Social Accountability up-scaling in the next phase of PSNP.</li>
<li><em>What investments in bridging social capital/interlocutors pay off?</em> – ESAP2 is an investment in capacity development projects. ESAP2 provides training and capacity development support to 49 Social Accountability Implementing Partners (SAIPs) which mobilise citizens through existing groups and social structures, develop local capacity to hold government to account for basic service delivery, and facilitate the interface interactions. SAIPs (grantees) are currently working in 223 districts of the country, across all 11 regions, which is just over 25% of all districts in Ethiopia. One of the questions for the EDD is around sustaining this Social Accountability expertise over time. This requires leadership from civil society, as well as a funding logic.</li>
</ul>
<p>Related to this last point, the GPSA presentation suggests that <strong>capacity development counts, but how long does it take?</strong> It is suggested to trigger virtuous circles, were citizens can increase voice that affects reforms which increases voice again.</p>
<p>The ESAP2 projects have a 2 year life span, but this is likely not going to be enough to sustain behavioural change among citizens as well as service providers. We are working with SAIPs to develop strategies to bring SA beyond their project area. There are two initiatives that are worth mentioning in this context:</p>
<ul>
<li>SAIPs (ESAP2 grantees) have been helped to reflect on dissemination of SA messages (e.g. citizens have entitlements and should organise to check that their local government is doing what it is supposed to do) beyond their direct project intervention areas. The focus is on working with existing organisations and structures that are members of the district SA committee</li>
</ul>
<blockquote><p><em><strong>An example:</strong></em> In the case of Women's Association Tigray, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is a member of the SA Committee, and it has committed to speak about SA and FTA in all its churches.</p>
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li>ESAP2 has an active social media strategy with: </li>
</ul>
<ol>
<li><a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">Website</a> including e-subscription quarterly <a href="http://esap2.org.et/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ESAP2-NewsFlash.pdf" target="_blank">Newsletter</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/ESAP2/239830496139942?ref=ts&fref=ts" target="_blank">FaceBook</a> page that has grown from 50 to 1850 fans in the past 4 months (43% Ethiopian women between 25 and 35)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/ESAP2Channel" target="_blank">YouTube channel</a> with participatory videos by SAIPs that have been trained by ESAP2. Participatory videos are used to support service dialogues, and to document project experience.</li>
</ol>
<p></p>
<p>I look forward to the <a href="http://streaming1.worldbank.org/vvflash/live5" target="_blank">live streaming of the presentation on April 1st</a> (internet conditions permitting).</p>Large group event – capturing what happenstag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2014-02-23:6394996:BlogPost:116212014-02-23T16:25:29.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p>How do you take the essence of what happens in a group of close to 200 people? This question becomes even more difficult to answer when the audience is predominantly geared to an oral rather than a writing culture. Here’s what we did:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Find out who likes to write:</strong> In an icebreaker, we asked the audience to stand up if a statement related to them. One of the statements was: you have a masters’ degree. This enabled us to identify people who likely know how to…</li>
</ol>
<p>How do you take the essence of what happens in a group of close to 200 people? This question becomes even more difficult to answer when the audience is predominantly geared to an oral rather than a writing culture. Here’s what we did:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Find out who likes to write:</strong> In an icebreaker, we asked the audience to stand up if a statement related to them. One of the statements was: you have a masters’ degree. This enabled us to identify people who likely know how to capture the essence of a one hour small-group conversation. We approached these people individually, and mobilised their support to write down “What was most interesting in this conversation, and why?”</li>
<li><strong>Use cards to capture suggestions:</strong> One of our themes was strengthening the link between two programs. Small groups were asked to keep track of suggestions on cards. These cards were collected by the facilitators. We regularly analysed all the cards that were coming in, and posted the key points on a news wall.<a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782657?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782657?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750" class="align-full"/></a></li>
<li><strong>Interviewing the audience:</strong> Our communications officer was interviewing people about the lessons they were learning. Next time, we will also try to use video interviewing.</li>
<li><strong>Social media:</strong> We had a daily post on our Facebook page (well, almost daily) and asked the audience to like and comment under the post. I learned that it is better for people to comment rather than to post on a Facebook page. If they post on the page, only their friends may see it. If they comment on a post everyone can see it. Social media are a great way to capture the atmosphere of the event.</li>
</ol>Learning by comparingtag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2014-02-23:6394996:BlogPost:113842014-02-23T15:39:45.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p>How do you organise learning from projects among 50 civil society organisations and their government counterparts? The method we used was learning benchmarks. We gathered data about the projects from quarterly reports, and presented this in the form of tables and graphs. In this way, projects of 5 organisations were compared on progress, social inclusion, gender mainstreaming and satisfaction with behaviour change of citizens and government stakeholders in the project.…</p>
<p></p>
<p>How do you organise learning from projects among 50 civil society organisations and their government counterparts? The method we used was learning benchmarks. We gathered data about the projects from quarterly reports, and presented this in the form of tables and graphs. In this way, projects of 5 organisations were compared on progress, social inclusion, gender mainstreaming and satisfaction with behaviour change of citizens and government stakeholders in the project.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782394?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782394?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p>According to participants, the benchmark that created the most interesting discussions was the benchmark on gender mainstreaming. This benchmark was derived from a qualitative section in the quarterly reports, answering the question: what is your approach to gender mainstreaming? Text was scored according to the following definitions.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782678?profile=original" target="_self"><img src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782678?profile=original" width="461" class="align-center"/></a></p>
<p>Only very few organisations received a score of ‘3’, which we suggested was the ideal. This was a good discussion starter. In one group somebody complained: “do they really want us to do this?” The others in the group dryly answered that gender mainstreaming was part of the project agreement, and started explaining what they had done so far, and how they could do more to “aim for 3”.</p>
<p>In the case of the gender score, there is an ideal situation to work towards. Most other benchmarks are not that straight forward. Some graphs compared number and type of people reached (e.g. social groups) with certain project activities. One may think that the highest number is the best. However, it all depends on the context. In a remote rural area it may be much more difficult to reach large numbers of people than in a densely populated area near a town. In benchmarking, the practice behind the numbers is the most interesting.</p>
<p>The benchmarks proved to be an excellent way to initiate sharing of experiences, and to learn from each other. Participants developed action plan to implement their learning, which we will monitor over time.</p>Reality Training - getting the 10% of learning righttag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2013-11-01:6394996:BlogPost:113002013-11-01T10:10:06.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782194?profile=original" target="_self"><img class="align-right" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782194?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="200"></img></a> “I have got the best experience in my career in the last 5 days.” This is an example of the great comments we received from participants in a training for new grantees of the <a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">Ethiopia Social Accountabiltiy Programme</a> phase 2 (also on…</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782194?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="200" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782194?profile=RESIZE_320x320" width="200" class="align-right"/></a>“I have got the best experience in my career in the last 5 days.” This is an example of the great comments we received from participants in a training for new grantees of the <a href="http://esap2.org.et/" target="_blank">Ethiopia Social Accountabiltiy Programme</a> phase 2 (also on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/ESAP2/239830496139942?filter=2" target="_blank">FaceBook</a>). So, what was so special about this training?</p>
<p>“It was so real, I almost felt like I was attending the interface meeting between citizens and government officials,” one of our team said during the facilitators meeting at the end of the third training day. Initially, the facilitators were a bit skeptical: would it work to bring the whole project team together, and to train finance officers together with M&E officers, District Coordinators and Project Coordinators in the same week? Well, it worked great, and here’s why. Participants learn best when they are put in situations that resemble the real work as close as possible. This training therefore followed the Social Accountability project cycle, and each group of participants was learning about their specific job in the project along the way.</p>
<p></p>
<p>This is the visual representation of our training design. Each box represents a session, and the boxes with a red border are attended by everyone in the project team.</p>
<p><a href="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782377?profile=original" target="_self"><img width="750" src="http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/1562782377?profile=RESIZE_1024x1024" width="750" class="align-full"/></a></p>
<p>As an example, some District Coordinators were invited to facilitate the interface meeting, using the findings from the community score card exercise they had conducted in the morning session. During the interface meeting, for which the trainers had prepared various roles for citizens, Service Providers and District Officials to make it as real as possible, other District Coordinators were observing the dynamics in the interface meeting: who was helpful, who was challenging? Observation is an important skill of facilitators that is often overlooked. Meanwhile, the Project Coordinators were observing the facilitation by District Coordinators and learned to give appreciative feedback. Finance officers attended the interface meeting as well, and one of them commented later: “This gives me a better understanding of the type of costs involved in organizing interface meetings.” In this way, everyone was learning what they had to learn in the same practical session.</p>
<p>I call this approach to learning “Reality Training”. All the sessions in the training program are designed so that participants are prepared for their upcoming work, individually, and as a team. At the end of each day, the team came together to share important learning from the different sessions they had attended. This proved to be a real team builder, an additional benefit of the training. We are pleased that the evaluation showed that our design worked very well, but the proof is in the pudding. Will the new grantees do better with project start-up than the grantees that have started before them? To be continued…</p>Capacity Development is 90% more than trainingtag:beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com,2013-07-09:6394996:BlogPost:104772013-07-09T16:02:18.000ZLucia Nasshttp://beads-passionforfacilitation.ning.com/profile/0p04be6q8vu0o
<p>What's interesting about starting a new long term is assignment is that you get a chance to prove yourself all over again. When I prepared for my latest new assignment, I discovered that the organisation seemed to equate Capacity Development with training. How could I let my new colleagues begin to think about the fact that Capacity Development is much more than training...</p>
<p></p>
<p>A while ago I stumbled upon a clip developed by Charles Jennings. It's called the 70:20:10 approach to…</p>
<p>What's interesting about starting a new long term is assignment is that you get a chance to prove yourself all over again. When I prepared for my latest new assignment, I discovered that the organisation seemed to equate Capacity Development with training. How could I let my new colleagues begin to think about the fact that Capacity Development is much more than training...</p>
<p></p>
<p>A while ago I stumbled upon a clip developed by Charles Jennings. It's called the 70:20:10 approach to learning. In sum he states that training contributes 10% to people’s learning and improvement, 20% is achieved through colleagues, networking and knowing the right people to get advice and insights, and 70% is achieved by learning from doing the actual work. Watch it, it's great and takes just 4 minutes.</p>
<p></p>
<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/t6WX11iqmg0?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0"></iframe>
</p>
<p></p>
<p><strong>Key message:</strong></p>
<p>Informal (or experiential) learning has to be supported by managers.</p>
<p>How do you manage the 90% informal learning? You can't...</p>
<p>You can facilitate, support, make it happen, because</p>
<p>people manage their own learning.</p>
<p>Make resources available, all the time, through various channels</p>
<p>and let people get on with <em><strong>their own learning</strong></em>.</p>
<p>Stop pushing content at people,</p>
<p>people will learn when they need it, when they got problems to solve.</p>
<p></p>
<p>The video has worked well so far, because it introduces a simple vocabulary for complex stuff. The 10% formal learning has been developed and delivered. Now let's become more strategic about the other 90%!</p>