Social accountability is citizen-led action to hold public officials and service providers to account for the use of public resources and services delivered. It provides an avenue for citizens to exercise their constitutional right to participate in decisions and processes concerning their own development. Social accountability processes are critical in ensuring that government services are delivered as planned and budgeted are of quality and good value for money for citizens.
Social Accountability Mechanisms and Tools
These are some of the social accountability mechanisms and tools, They can be applied and adapted to serve different purposes and contexts
Read more on Social Accountability:
What are the benefits of Social Accountability?
What does the typical Social Accountability process entail?
Resources
County Planning, County Budgeting and Social Accountability Handbook. Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), 2014
Participatory Budgeting, Community Score Card, Citizen Report Card Toolkit Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), 2015.
Expenditure tracking. International Budget Partnership (IBP)
Social accountability tools for county service delivery. Training for community mobilisers. AHADI. November 2018
A community score card is a tool applied in a participatory process to rate public services and performance of a service provider (for example, health, education facilities) using scores defined by the community. It aims at identifying failures and gaps in service delivery, and provide feedback to the provider in order to improve the quality, efficiency, accessibility, relevance and accountability in the delivery of public services.
The process brings together the users and providers of a service to identify problems, jointly develop solutions to resolve the service delivery problems identified. They can be particularly useful in monitoring the quality of local service delivery at service delivery points and for measuring the impacts of a project.
