Social Accountability in Africa: Practitioners’ Experiences and Lessons

There are numerous examples of how citizens and civil society groups hold their government, private sector actors and donors accountable. However, these initiatives are often not known beyond the borders of the state or country where they are implemented. Thus, other citizens and civil society organisations (CSOs) concerned about service delivery in their communities cannot learn about how other community members extract accountability from their government officials.

This book presents a range of case studies that examine the experiences and lessons of practitioners who have pioneered social accountability initiatives in their country or sector. There is no single ‘silver bullet’ or special recipe for creating successful social accountability initiatives; but the best strategy will always depend on the social and political context, and success depends on the existing governance context determined by both historical and contemporary factors.

The book presents the following findings:

• The Office of the Ombudsman exists to guard against the arbitrary use and misuse of power in a democracy. It is there to uphold fairness, good governance and the rule of law. with a mandate to investigate citizens’ complaints concerning maladministration, acts or decisions of the government, and to recommend remedies
• The large allocation of resources from the government and donors to HIV across African countries has not translated into sufficiently effective programmes for HIV prevention, treatment and care. One reason for this is the lack of attention paid to economic governance.

Substantial progress has been made since the pioneering initiatives on social accountability. There is, however, a long way to go before these initiatives become widespread on the African continent. In particular, trategies aimed at strengthening and institutionalising social accountability need to pay particular attention to changing historical contexts.Most ordinary Africans still demonstrate an incomplete grasp of political accountability. While they are willing to play a more questioning and critical role toward the state, and clearly support multi-party elections, and want their legislators to remain close at hand, they still hold paternalistic views of the state. Policymakers need to pay more attention to creating an enabling environment for social accountability. They must grapple with systemic problems that arise because many of the mechanisms normally available to ensure accountability are either corrupted or inoperable.

Out of the entire continent and thousands of aid initiatives, only a small number of success stories can be found that demonstrate efficient and effective monitoring of resource flows.  Among the recommendations are the following:

• To improve aid effectiveness it is imperative that donor states, recipient states and multilateral agencies collaborate to implement decentralisation projects which include strong monitoring components.
• Traditional approach to resource monitoring which focuses almost entirely on the accounting side of the issue must be modified to emphasise accountability.