Increasing responsiveness and accountability of governance institutions

Key strategies used by NGO’s involved in the process, with examples from South Asia.

Key strategy 1:

Engaging directly in accountability functions.

• Bangladesh: Deciding to revive a defunct Health Advisory Committee in order to press the public health system to be responsive to women’s health concerns.
• India: Involving in the local participatory planning process to ensure accountability to a gender-sensitive process and to demand that standards of accountability be set by gender equality outcomes.
• Pakistan: Drawing government, commission members, civil society and experts into a post-facto consultative process to influence the development of the mandate and terms of reference for the National Commission on the Status of Women.

Key strategy 2:

Revealing deficiencies and ‘helping’ officials do their accountability job.

• Bangladesh: Revealing deficiencies in the primary health system by conducting surveys and observing procedures, and highlighting these in consultations with stakeholders. Helping the Health Advisory Committee by getting clearance, conducting meetings, and setting priorities.
• Bangladesh: Working to help women elected to local government to influence planning processes, undertaking a situational analysis of the local council to reveal corruption in the system and women’s marginalisation. Training the elected women in resource mapping, to contribute to the planning process.
• India: Conducting a budget analysis of the local council and observing planning meetings to show gender biases. Helping in the planning process by attending forums, contributing project ideas, and conducting research to inform the process.

Key strategy 3:

Building a ‘constituency’ for accountability.

• Bangladesh: Allying (by the national NGO) with a large local NGO, which had an extensive network and access to women’s organisations, to carry the work forward together.
• India: Working for greater responsiveness to women’s literacy as a crucial empowerment tool, undertaking collaborative action research to link non-literate women to government and non-government educational institutions.
• Pakistan: Arranging provincial consultations to link civil society organisations to members of the Women’s Commission and government officials, in the process of helping to legitimise civil society engagement in accountability functions.

Key strategy 4:

Claiming spaces close to the site of accountability failure, and usually occupied by public officials.

• Bangladesh: Working inside the Health Advisory Committee as meeting convenors and inside the health centre as researchers.
• Bangladesh: Working in the Union Parishad (the lowest administrative division in decentralised local government), generating information that ought to have been provided to elected members.
• India: Working in local government, attending sectoral committee meetings and village meetings in the role as researchers.

Key strategy 5:

Setting new standards for gender accountability.

• Bangladesh: Including women’s health concerns (such as maternal mortality and the quality of pre- and post-natal care) as accountability indicators in the health service, as these were not indicators of accountability in the present system.
• India: Wanting women’s presence and interests to dismantle the patriarchal norms which bias the process (and not only wanting procedures for allocating resources to women and their nominal participation in planning), by working at shifting the focus of all accountability actors from gender-sensitive procedures to gender equality outcomes.
• Pakistan: Attaining the National Commission on the Status of Women to disengage women’s security concerns from the patriarchal nexus of family, community and religious bodies, so that it would be able to address concerns such as ‘honour killings’ and be accountable to women’s interests that go beyond material developmental needs.

Source: Adapted from Mukhopadhyay & Meer.