SPEAR and One World Trust promote accountability

Accountability; we’ve heard about that several times but now there’s another effort on the subject. The Society for the Promotion of Education Advocacy and Research has been working over the past few years with One World Trust, which is based in London. Their project is a toolkit to promote accountability among Civil Society Organizations. It started with a pilot phase between 2008 and 2009, which focused on finding ways to strengthen the ability of CSO’s to govern themselves internally. Today the toolkit, which is already being distributed, was officially launched along with a week of activities to promote it.

Nicole Haylock, Executive Director, SPEAR

nicole haylock

“We have to introduce the accountability toolkit, which was developed by the One World Trust and Commonwealth Foundation for Belize. It’s custom made for Belize and we want to share with the public the importance of this toolkit. This week we have a series of activities. Tomorrow we will have a one day workshop from eight-thirty to four with network Civil Societies, well known Civil Societies. In truth there are many civil societies who are not concerned at all with keeping accountable to their stakeholders. That is true and this is why we are here to encourage them and to highlight why it is important. We’re targeting networks, for example, APAMO or WinBelize, they are umbrella organizations with a lot of agencies.”

robert lloyd

Robert Lloyd, Program Manager, One World Trust (London)

“It strengthens their credibility, secondly it strengthens their legitimacy and the third it strengthens their effectiveness. NGOs and civil society organizations are able to show how they’re representing the voices of the communities that they’re working with and they’re able to show the government how they’re representing these voices. That’s going to strengthen their position and it’s going to strengthen their leverage. In the next phase of the project, we want to take this toolkit and we want to encourage its implementation. We want to work with organizations to try and apply it, to use it as a self assessment, to use it as a peer assessment. So over the next few months ourselves and spear will be working with organizations to get them to apply this to themselves.”

The Civil Society Accountability Toolkit is being distributed to NGOs and is available at SPEAR’s office.