Supporting Citizens and Governments to work together to solve governance problems
South-South Workshop for Finalists June 24-26, 2013 France
On June 24-26, 2013, the GPSA organized the first South-South workshop for the 12 finalist civil society organizations that the GPSA Steering Committee has pre-selected for the first grants. The workshop marked the kick-off of the GPSA Knowledge Platform activities. The goal of the workshop: to prepare the finalists for project implementation, once their GPSA grant funding would be approved. In the workshop, the finalists had the chance to meet one another and also with several experts on governance and social accountability from civil society, the World Bank and academia. On the agenda were a variety of questions that generally pose the biggest challenges to those working on social accountability projects: What type of citizen feedback is the project going to generate, and what is the governance problem this will help to solve? Which officials in Government are expected to use this feedback? Why would these officials act upon the feedback they receive, and which incentives play a role? Starting with these questions, participants discussed good practices and key challenges in project implementation, with the goal to use this new learning to improve their project proposals. Roby Senderowitsch, GPSA Program Manager, explained the World Bank’s role in the GPSA, which is to facilitate the conversation between civil society and governments, using its regular engagement with officials and ministries in government. First, working in small groups, participants focused on the key approaches for effective implementation of social accountability projects:
Coalition-building and multi-stakeholder engagement, including mapping of stakeholders, their interests and levels of influence. This discussion was led by Courtney Tolmie, Results for Development and Marcos Mendiburu, World Bank Institute
Constructive engagement with government; a discussion guided by Helene Grandvoinnet from the World Bank Using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for social accountability, facilitated by Cathryn Stickel, Operations Manager at FrontlineSMS Budget analysis and monitoring. Maria Poli from the GPSA team, and Russell Wildeman, the workshop facilitator conducted this session.
The discussions on each topic helped to bring forward the commonalities and differences across projects and countries. Importantly, it helped the CSOs to think about the political economy that they would face, and the importance of engaging politicians in a constructive way. The participants recognized the need to engage their Ministries of Finance alongside their sectoral Ministries. The session on Monitoring and Evaluation by Lily Tsai (MIT) motivated the CSOs to pay attention to results and impact early on in project implementation, pointing out how a well-thought out M&E framework can save time and effort further down the road. This session was modeled as a ‘fishbowl’: taking the example of CARE-Malawi’s Results Framework, participants collectively discussed strengths and weaknesses about the proposed Framework for the project, as well as linkages to the GPSA’s overall Results Framework. Says Tsai: “Failure creates opportunities for innovation. A project that didn’t fully achieve its stated objective, but managed to generate results in terms of learning, can still be considered useful.” The third day of the workshop was dedicated to knowledge and learning. Participants engaged in discussion about their K&L plans and came up with ideas for the GPSA Knowledge Platform. Particularly, the discussion focused on strategies for turning knowledge and learning into a long-term process rather than a set of concrete, fragmented activities. Thereby, organizations could become engines for learning internally, from which external knowledge exchange could flow. Janet Oropeza from FUNDAR, the Mexican organization selected to design and develop the GPSA Knowledge Portal, presented the plans for the online platform and gathered inputs from participants on the key priorities for K&L. In the last session of the workshop, the participants received explanation of the World Bank’s fiduciary and reporting requirements. Vinay Barghava, of the Partnership for Transparency Fund and partner of the proposed project for the Philippines, summarized the three key takeaways from the workshop: 1) The establishment of a community of practice among the grantees. They established contacts, exchanged ideas and best practices that helped them to further refine their project proposals; 2) The CSOs explored common strategies, with regard to multi-stakeholder coalition building, results frameworks, use of ICTs, monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and Knowledge and Learning. 3) All finalists are keen to contribute to the GPSA Knowledge Platform.