Social Accountability

Helping communities speak up for services

 

Government commitments and budgets guarantee essential services to families: but the reality is often different. More often than not, it’s the most marginalised who miss out when governments don’t fulfil their promises.

Social accountability empowers communities to speak up and advocate for better services from their governments: whether it’s in healthcare, education, child protection, access to nutrition, climate action, gender equity or other areas that impact the wellbeing of children and their families.

World Vision’s social accountability approach is called Citizen Voice and Action (CVA). Since 2005 CVA has been used across more than 50 countries to help communities hold their local and national governments accountable, and work with them to improve services.

CVA is simple, powerful and flexible. It can be integrated within a wide range of other programming, playing a crucial role in strengthening systems to ensure sustainable results. It is effective in rural, urban and fragile settings.

Information generated through the CVA process can now be entered in a global digital database. The database currently captures local data from over 250,000 communities across 25 countries. When brought together, the combined local-level data is a powerful tool for influencing change at subnational and national level.

CVA aligns directly to Sustainable Development Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Accountable Institutions, and also contributes to numerous other goals depending on the focus of the advocacy (eg health, education).

Our approach to change

Parents, health care providers, teachers, religious leaders, and local politicians gather to evaluate their local government health clinic and advocate for necessary improvements.

Citizen Voice and Action

Citizen Voice and Action is a local level advocacy methodology that transforms the dialogue between communities and government in order to improve services, like health care and education, which impact the daily lives of children and their families.

The goal of Citizen Voice and Action is to improve the accessibility and quality of public services. Through collaborative, non-confrontational dialogue between service users, government and providers, users are empowered to monitor and seek accountability for service delivery and to take collective responsibility for services. CVA is based on the view that each citizen has the right to hold to account his or her government for fulfilling its commitments.

What is Citizen Voice and Action?