Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have been asked to make social accountability an integral part of democratic governance to enable the citizenry hold them and governments accountable and responsive in the discharge of their duties.
Ms Dorcas Ansah, Monitoring, Evaluation and Communications Manager of STAR-Ghana, made the call when speaking on the topic: “Monitoring, Evaluation and Social Accountability in Ghana” at the Ghana Monitoring and Evaluation Forum held in Accra on Thursday.
The quarterly forum is organised by Ghana Monitoring and Evaluation Forum in collaboration with the World Bank and supported by UNICEF, UNDP, UNFPA, ISSER, Africa Leadership Initiative, and Ernest and Young.
The forum brings together professionals from national and international NGOs, government, Parliament and the private sector to discuss “Monitoring and Evaluation in the Civil Society Sector in Ghana”.
Ms Ansah said social accountability was the approach towards building accountability that relied on civic engagement or civil society organisations that participated directly or indirectly in exacting accountability and should be taken seriously for Ghana, to make headway in democratic governance.
She said CSOs and public officials must be accountable to the people they served as part of their responsibility in the discharge of their duties, and noted that social accountability should go beyond exercising one’s franchise and ensure that the citizenry demanded accountability as their ultimate right.
“We need to use monitoring and evaluation to achieve increased impact in social accountability and ensure that there is an alignment between commitment to transparency and accountability,” Ms Ansah added.
She stressed the need to provide information to the citizenry since any information they lacked would serve as a hindrance to their knowledge and what they needed to demand from public officials.
Mr Samuel Zan Akologo, a Development Consultant who spoke on “Monitoring, Evaluation and Social Accountability at the Grassroots,” outlined the challenges facing CSOs as capacity, resistance of duty bearers; sustain partnerships, centralised governance, weakness in national development planning system and constraints of legal environment.
He called for the need to create an enabling legal environment, make decentralisation more operational, build the capacities of CSOs and improve the use of the media and other ICTs for the dissemination of development information.
“Social responsibility at the grassroots can promote the social cohesion that seems to be eluding the citizenry faster. Systems and mechanisms for social accountability are essential but civic virtues are needed to accelerate the process,” he added.
Ms Jessica Kiessel, Country Director of Innovation for Poverty Action, who spoke on “Case Study and Discussion of an Impact Evaluation Model for Social Accountability” recommended that more funds should be provided for the programme.