Since 2008, the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in East Asia and the Pacific (ANSA-EAP) has accomplished a significant amount of work in areas of networking, research, learning and capacity-building, information and awareness-raising, and resource mobilization for social accountability in the East Asia and the Pacific region.
The Social Accountability School, in particular, has been instrumental in supporting the emerging practice of social accountability in Cambodia and in consolidating similar practices and experiences of other countries in East Asia and the Pacific.
After having three successful runs of Social Accountability School in Cambodia, the network has accumulated a wide knowledge resource base from its pool of seasoned practitioners and participants who brought in new insights, lessons, and field-based experiences on social accountability.
This Manual for Trainers on Social Accountability supports ANSA-EAP’s goal of building a community of competent and empowered social accountability practitioners, advocates, and champions in the region.
This is an introductory learning material aimed at promoting appreciation and understanding of social accountability for those who will encounter it for the first time.
They are future training organizers, resource persons, and training facilitators from citizen groups and government agencies who are interested to learn about the scope, basic concepts, and applications of social accountability to promote good governance.
The training manual adheres to the following principles that define ANSA-EAP’s Social Accountability School:
Learner-centered. The Training Manual is a guide for trainers in facilitating a learning process that is inductive, participatory, and grounded on the participants’ country and organizational context.
Learning-in-action. ANSA-EAP’s learning and capacity-building programs follow the learning-inaction cycle wherein the learning process takes off from the participant’s milieu—learning experiences, local context, current knowledge and attitudes towards social accountability—and linking those more “familiar” starting points with the theoretical and field-based knowledge and experiences of their co-participants, training facilitators, and mentors.
To facilitate this learning approach, the training manual features structured learning exercises that can help the participants relate their experiences to the key concepts of social accountability.
Each training session ends with a set of guide questions to allow trainers to synthesize the discussions and highlight the most important learning points.
Localizing the learning process. Social accountability does not exist in a vacuum. It is affected by various social, economic, political, and cultural factors.
The Tips for Trainers will help the training facilitators draw out context-specific factors, which can bring the discussions closer to the governance and development issues in the participants’ country or community.
Likewise, the said tips are crafted to guide trainers localize key concepts and make learning content and processes culturally-sensitive and appropriate.
The training manual is structured into three parts:
The Introduction illustrates how ANSA-EAP values capacity-building as a strategy to mainstreaming and advocating social accountability among citizen groups and government institutions.
The second part features 11 Learning Modules of ANSA-EAP’s SAS categorized into conceptual framework, methods and tools, and special topics. Here, the participants are introduced to the key concepts, theoretical underpinnings, applications, and barriers of implementing social accountability framework and tools.
The conceptual framework comprises four sessions namely, introduction to good governance and ethical leadership in governance (a special topic under good governance), citizenship and civic engagement, decentralization of governance, and social accountability.
The sessions under the Methods and Tools are structured in a systematic fashion following the four phases of Public Financial Management (PFM) cycle.
These social accountability tools include participatory planning, participatory budgeting, participatory expenditure tracking, and participatory performance monitoring.
The special topics featured in the training manual are Procurement Monitoring (under participatory expenditure tracking) and Media and Good Governance.
The third part of the training manual is a Trainer’s Guide.
It offers practical information on how to organize, facilitate, and evaluate a social accountability training.
It also compiles all the structured learning exercises and sample templates for training needs assessment, trainer’s agenda, and training evaluation.
The Trainer’s Guide also provides information on how to carry out mentoring, coaching, and exposure visits (MCEV).
This part draws heavily from ANSA-EAP’s experience in conducting MCEV with the participants of the Program to Enhance Capacity for Social Accountability (PECSA) in Cambodia.
The Trainer’s Guide concludes with some notes on building a community of social accountability practitioners as one of the key strategies in mainstreaming social accountability in the programs, policies, and organizational processes of citizen groups and governments in the East Asia and the Pacific region.
The training manual also features a number of sidebars designed to guide the trainers on how to conduct and facilitate the training.
Here is a description of each tool found in this manual:
As mentioned earlier, this training manual is an introductory learning material intended for future training organizers and training facilitators of social accountability.
The Manual is not designed, however, to cover all competency requirements that are necessary to implement social accountability initiatives nor to provide a comprehensive and extensive discussion of social accountability concepts and tools.
Likewise, the chapters are relatively short to give the trainers the optimum amount and range of learning content, which in turn, encourages them to make use of other reference materials that may not be cited in this training manual.