For the past three months, CIVICUS’ Resilient Roots project and Youth Action team have engaged youth-led initiatives to explore how they understand and practice accountability to their constituencies, i.e. the communities they serve and support.
Youth leaders from 16 countries, focusing on various issues ranging from critical service provision and women empowerment to citizen engagement and human rights activism, attended these conversations. Despite different contexts, their definitions and experiences were similar. We documented some of these experiences and facilitated practical learning sessions to help them further strengthen their accountability approaches. This is an account of some of the core themes we learned from how they practise constituent accountability.
Access the full report and read their recommendations here.
We also spoke to youth leaders from India and South Africa about how they have been practicing accountability to their constituents. They have each done this by highlighting one of the three dimensions of constituent accountability: giving account (sharing information about who they are and what they do); taking account (continuously listening to and acting on feedback from their constituents); being held to account (including the role of constituents in organisational decision making).
