Project description

Title: Ethiopian Social Accountability Project
Financier: Multi-donor trust fund, managed by the World Bank
Country: Ethiopia
Overall term: 2007 to 2009

Context

Water and sanitation, agriculture,  health, and education: the Ethiopian Social Accountability Project (ESAP) articulates the needs and concerns of Ethiopia’s poor regarding their access to these basic services. Working through civil society organisations, the project opens up channels of communication between them and the relevant government bodies and public service providers.

ESAP is one of the four components of the Protection of Basic Services (PBS), a broad programme of the Government of Ethiopia intended to ensure the poor receive essential basic services according to their needs. Through PBS, major donors contribute to increased spending in the regions and woredas to provide more teachers, rural health workers, agricultural support services and improved sanitation for the poor. While donors work to boost access to pro-poor services, they have also provided funding and expertise to ESAP to initiate, support and strengthen social accountability throughout Ethiopia.

Objective

Citizens have become involved in the introduction and establishment of instruments to strengthen social responsibility. Dialogues take place with greater transparency, involving the local authorities as well as civil society organisations, citizens and service providers.

Approach

The project is helping civil society organisations (CSOs) empower people through accountability mechanisms, such as community score cards, which people use to evaluate their local service providers according to the quality of their services. The CSOs also work together with kebeles, woredas and municipalities to increase transparency in the preparation and execution of public budgets. Promoting 'budget literacy' for a wide range of people is a project priority.

GTZ International Services has been hired as ESAP’s independent management agency to award grants to CSOs on a competitive basis and coordinate 12 projects piloting social accountability in about 100 woredas throughout the country. GTZ is also supporting the beneficiary CSOs with capacity building measures intended to make their implementation more effective.

By pre-testing various social accountability tools in Ethiopia and fostering the exchange of knowledge and best practices between stakeholders, ESAP is enabling and energising the civil society sector as well as the public sector to promote social accountability throughout Ethiopia.

Results achieved so far

Social accountability tools such as the community score cards, are new to Ethiopia. When it began, ESAP launched two short-term projects to demonstrate the feasibility and appropriateness of applying these tools in the country. One focused on the delivery of water and sanitation services in Addis Ababa and the other addressed budgeting for primary education in Debre Birhan, a smaller city outside the capital. The 12 pilot social accountability projects now being implemented throughout Ethiopia build on the experiences gained through those first projects.