Training on Social Accountability Tools for SALGP, Nepal

“We should have attended this training programme much earlier. We were using the term social accountability in a very limited manner ... now we have a deeper understanding of social accountability tools as well as methods to use these tools,” said Sovita Pariyar on completing the participatory training on “Social Accountability: Tools and Issues” conducted between 20 and 25 June 2016 by PRIA for five staff (one female and four male participants) from Communication and Management (COMAT) and ASTHA, Nepal. These two CSOs are jointly implementing Strengthening the Accountability of Local Governments Project (SALGP) in 9 districts of Nepal, supported by Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and Ministry of Federal State and Local Development (MoFALD) Nepal. The objective of the training programme was for the staff members to develop understanding on concepts and tools of social accountability and their application for promotion of good governance at the local level.

The training was organized in sandwich mode where participants learnt the concepts of social accountability in the first two days, visited a field location on the third day to learn application of these tools in the health sector and consolidated their learnings over the last two days. Participants were able to learn tools like Citizen Report Card (CRC), Community Score Card (CSC), Social Audit (SA), Budget Tracking and Public Hearing, how to analyse the data and share it with practitioners and policy makers for efficient and quality delivery of services. They visited a primary health centre (PHC) in Ghughari gram panchayat, Malsisar block, Jhunjhunu district in Rajasthan. There they learnt about the spaces that are available to citizens in planning, decision making and management of services. During the field visit they also met with community members, elected representatives of panchayati raj institutions (PRIs), office bearers of the PHC, and representatives of civil society organizations.

The training programme was facilitated by Dr. Kaustuv Kanti Bandyopadhyay, Dr. Alok Pandey and Priti Sharma from PRIA. Support during the field visit was provided by Mr. Rajan Chaudhari and Shishir Kumar of Shikshit Rojgar Kendra Prabhandhak Samiti (SRKPS), Rajasthan.