Social Accountability
Social Accountability
Our Impact
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
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?
Featured Projects
Leave No one Behind
In September 2023 WV was elected into the steering committee of The Leave No one Behind Partnership; on this committee we partner with other CSOs to collaborate and innovate to improve people’s lives worldwide.
Open Government Partnership
In June 2018, World Vision signed a letter of collaboration with the Open Government Partnership. We actively work with OGP to strengthen efforts to promote citizen participation for improved service delivery by their respective government.
World Bank and Global Platform for Social Accountability
World Vision has partnered with the World Bank’s Global Partnership for Social Accountability over the years to pilot social accountability innovations in different countries, namely Indonesia, Cambodia, Armenia and Rwanda to roll out social accountability practices for improved governance.
