The design of the Advocacy and Social Accountability (ASA) mechanism is well under way at the GPE Secretariat in collaboration with the Technical Advisory Panel (TAP), Global Campaign for Education (GCE), and the consortium of Second Muse and Bivee that has been hired to support the GPE Secretariat.
The GPE Strategy and Impact Committee (SIC) will be reviewing the draft operational design in late July, with the aim of informing a final proposal to the Board for their consideration at the end of the year. So what is ASA all about?
The evolution of GPE’s financing for civil society
GPE has invested in building civil society capacity since 2009, with its first ever grant to the Global Campaign for Education to implement the Civil Society Education Fund. Ten years on, GPE has embedded support for civil society into its financing architecture, with the aim of building civil society capacity to improve their participation, advocacy and efforts to ensure transparency and effectiveness in education sector implementation.
This work will build on the lessons learned from GPE’s past experience and from good practice in the field of grant-making for civil society. The evolution of GPE’s support for civil society reflects some of the following shifts in GPE’s grant-making strategy:
- Improving accountability by investing in a wider set of actors and processes
GPE recognizes that civil society is plural, representing diverse views, interests, perspectives and strategies. It is this diversity that creates the conditions and necessity for deliberation, contestation and debate in education – which is necessary to strengthen accountability. While GPE has typically invested in education coalitions as a way to embrace that diversity, it also recognizes that there are many other civic actors outside of any one coalition that may bring important perspectives on education policy and implementation issues. Coalitions in the GCE network have been an important ‘spinal column’ to help organize civic participation in education, and GPE’s financing is now expanding to invest in the wider civic ecosystem as well.
- Enabling more contextual and results-focused advocacy and social accountability
Realities differ from country to country, and even from village to village. Given the dynamic pace of change in most societies, it is important to ensure that support for civil society provides the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. More results-focused civil society work can also enable us to move away from formulaic approaches to advocacy and social accountability, testing what works and experimenting with new forms of civic engagement in a responsive way. In this approach, what becomes most important is a nuanced understanding of the political, social and economic environments in which social accountability work is planned, and to tailor strategies and approaches to these environments.
- Putting an emphasis on capacity building and learning
The aim of ASA is to build the capacity of civil society to further the goals of GPE 2020 in equity, quality and stronger education systems. Put this way, the most critical outcome sought by ASA is a stronger civil society. Rather than focusing only on relatively short-term outputs of civil society social accountability projects, ASA is also making an explicit investment in the capabilities of civic groups to undertake accountability work. This includes not only capacities to effectively implement social accountability initiatives but to learn by doing, using regular monitoring and evaluation to drive more creative experimentation with what works. Through a focus on adaptive management and more iterative approaches, ASA will help to build a culture of learning for grantees and for the wider field. To do this, ASA will complement the important capacity building role of the GCE and its regional Secretariats by expanding the potential to work with additional learning partners and reciprocate learning opportunities with the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange platform.
- Investing explicitly in multi-level monitoring including transnationally
CSEF has primarily focused its support on strengthening national level advocacy. ASA will build on this, by explicitly driving accountability work down to sub-national and community levels through social accountability grants – and driving it upwards to monitor transnational policy developments through grants for transnational advocacy. In doing so, ASA recognizes that relationships of accountability are complex and operate across multiple levels of decision-making and under different governance influences. The most effective accountability strategies typically link oversight of each link in the results chain, to be able to identify where there are blockages and boomerang accountability by mobilizing authorities at different levels. While CSEF contained the seeds of this multi-level monitoring approach, ASA makes it explicit.
- Putting downwards accountability to citizens at the center
Inclusive and participatory policy dialogue has always been an essential element of the partnership approach in partner countries. ASA takes this idea a step further to articulate that the purpose of this approach is to enable stronger accountability of governments to the public. As such, ASA makes downwards accountability explicit, and the design of ASA seeks to ensure that citizens have a role to play not only in informing the direction of policy but also to hear back about what has changed and be a part of an ongoing process that puts their needs – and particularly those of the most marginalized or vulnerable groups - at the center.
Tapping into expertise from the field
GPE is working with a technical advisory panel of experts in the fields of education, social accountability, and grant-making, to provide guidance on key issues in the design of the new mechanism. This group has met regularly throughout 2018 to discuss good practice in ASA grantmaking, and help to bring a stronger understanding of work in this field to inform GPE’s expanded role in funding civil society.
In addition, the Global Campaign for Education Secretariat and Board has been engaged in ongoing dialogue with GPE about the results of the evaluation of CSEF III and the potential to expand on its success through a successor program. A two-day workshop is planned for mid-June to help further elaborate the role of this successor within the wider ASA mechanism and its theory of change.
Building on the rich consultations held throughout 2017 to learn from the experience and expertise of civil society practitioners in the fields of social accountability and advocacy, GPE is also hosting a wider web-based consultation with civil society on June 12 from 8:00 ET to 10:00 ET. The consultation will be held in English and French.
To RSVP please follow this link and submit your contact information by June 10th. We look forward to connecting with you shortly!
For more information or inquiries about this process please contact Sarah Beardmore at sbeardmore@globalpartnership.org