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CARE International has ample experience working in social accountability across the globe in a variety of different contexts. Our teams employ a variety of social accountability approaches and tools, including community score cards (CSC), community score boards, and alternative citizen oversight mechanisms which have been successfully adapted to local conditions in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Of particular note is CARE’s experience in the use of community score cards. CARE Malawi first developed the CSC methodology in 2002 as part of a project aimed at developing innovative and sustainable models to improve health services. Since then, the methodology and accompanying tools, such as Malawi’s Score Card Toolkit, have been taken up and adapted in various CARE offices, including Ethiopia, Tanzania, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Egypt and Cambodia. In January 2013, CARE established a community of practice to share learning and best practice on CSC. The CSC has become an internationally recognised tool for improving service delivery an adopted by other organisations such as the World Bank, who used the CSC tool in the education and health sectors of The Gambia.

CARE is building a robust body of evidence to understand what contexts and conditions favour the implementation of CSCs and which methods lead to more effective implementation. This year, CARE is developing research with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) comparing four cases (Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ethiopia) to draw out lessons on 1) which contexts may be most conducive for score card effectiveness/impact and 2) how programmes can be effectively adapted to differing contexts. In Malawi’s Maternal Health Alliance Project (MHAP), CARE is also using a cluster-randomised control design to evaluate the effectiveness of the CSC. The evaluation includes 10 intervention and 10 comparison clusters, and it consists of a women’s survey, a health worker survey and a medical chart review at baseline (2012) and endline (2015).

Furthermore, CARE is a global partner in the World Bank’s Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA). In Malawi, CARE is one of two organisations that were awarded grants to address teachers' absenteeism and corruption in schools, using mobile technology (cell phone and IT platform) and community score cards as tools to improve accountability. In Bangladesh, CARE is also one of just two organisations that were awarded grants to support the capacity of citizens to participate at the local level in participatory budgeting and to monitor the use of decentralised government funds.

In Egypt, in October 2010 and in partnership with the World Bank, CARE organised the first regional workshop on social accountability in the Arab world. Since March 2012, when the GPSA was officially launched in the region, CARE has been managing the ANSA network for the Arab world (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Yemen).

In Peru, CARE’s experience of citizen oversight of maternal and infant health services in rural areas has been hailed as an example of best practice at international level. The first report produced by the UN Commission and the World Health Organisation for Information and Accountability regarding the health of women and children - Independent Expert Review Group (iERG) for Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health – in September 2012 included eight examples around the world of how to promote citizen participation and accountability, CARE Peru’s experience with social monitoring in Melgar and Azángaro (Puno) was one of the championed case studies.

CARE has also been leading the way in terms of “forward_accountability,” adapting social accountability mechanisms to ensure that we are accountable to our primary stakeholders. In Peru, following an earthquake in 2007 CARE incorporated in its emergency response a number of mechanisms which allowed the affected population to understand and influence CARE programming and provide critical feedback. This then developed in to a “Guide to the organisation of systems for NGO accountability to the community” and Policy for Accountability and Transparency and a formal accountability system which are designedto institutionalise accountability within the organisation. Learning regarding how the system works and replicable best practice will be published shortly. In Nepal, CARE has supported public auditing in order to enhance the managerial and technical capacity of users committees related to construction projects. The country office has also used community score boards in its health projects to promote accountability at health facilities, and this tool has also been adapted to improve CARE’s forward_accountability.