Active participation of citizens to hold governments accountable essential to success of post 2015 goals

What is one of the best ways to improve aid effectiveness and ensure the post 2015 development goals are successful? Empowering citizens to hold governments accountable to their promises. That’s the message World Vision will be bringing to a high level side event of the sixth session of the Open Working Group in New York.

The Citizen Voices: How Citizen Participation and Social Accountability Can Drive Development Effectiveness side event on Friday, 13 December will bring together global accountability experts, academics and government representatives to discuss how sustainable development goals and the post 2015 framework can incorporate citizen led accountability.

The event is an opportunity to share best practices on social accountability – including Citizen Voice in Action – and perspectives on good governance and transparency initiatives.

Citizen Voice and Action, or CVA, is World Vision’s advocacy and social accountability approach. It works by educating citizens about their rights and equipping them with tools to engage their governments in non-adversarial ways to seek the improvement of essential government services like health and education.

“In the 34 countries where we’ve applied CVA, we’re finding that when communities, governments, and service providers come together to examine services from an evidence-based perspective, they can collectively solve the problems they face,” says World Vision’s Director of Local Advocacy, Jeff Hall.

“Using CVA, communities work collaboratively with government and service providers to compare reality against government’s own commitments – and to hold them accountable.  As government services improve, so does the well-being of children.”

One of the main outcomes of the Rio+20 Conference in 2012 was the agreement by Member States to launch a process – known as the Open Working Group – to develop a set of sustainable development goals. This is part of the broader United Nations process to develop a new set of global goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals, which are set to expire in 2015.

What: Citizen Voices: How Citizen Participation and Social Accountability Can Drive Development Effectiveness
When: Friday, December 13, 13:15pm-14:30
Where: Conference Room #9, UN Headquarters, New York

Moderator

Dr. Lynn Freedman, Professor. Columbia University

Panel

Ivan Vangu Ngimbi, Special Advisor to Lambert Mende Omalanga, Minister of Media, Communication and New Citizenship, Democratic Republic of Congo
Kate Gilmore, Assistant Secretary General. Deputy Executive Director of the UN Fund for Population Activities
James Kintu, Associate Director for Advocacy. World Vision Uganda
Roby Senderowitsch, Program Manager, Global Partnership for Social Accountability, World Bank