Social Accountability emerges as a response to the limitations of classical accountability, moving from a top-down accountability relationship or external monitoring of service providers toward a more active range of strategies to improve public sector performance by increasing citizen engagement and responsiveness of state actors. There have been different sets of Social Accountability strategies and tools being implemented in recent years such as the right to information acts, citizen report cards, citizen monitoring, social audit, participatory budgeting (Agarwal, Heltberg, and Diachok 2009; Gaventa and McGee 2013). Several rigorous impact evaluations have been carried out to approximate impacts of social accountability tools on increasing accountability of state actors, however, evidence to support such impacts has been mixed (Fox 2015). In his meta-analysis of Social Accountability impact evaluation studies, Fox found that information alone is not enough; information needs to be used to empower citizens. Information could turn into ‘voice’ only when the ‘fear factor’ is addressed either by anonymity or collective action. Social Accountability intervention needs ‘teeth’ – the ability of the supply side to respond to citizens by both proactive reforms or negative sanctions (2015).
The Implementation of SAF combines both the traditional tools of Social Accountabilities, such as Information Literacy, Citizen Empowerment and Community-Based Monitoring and the involvement of the supply side in responding to non-state actors’ demand. The Impact Evaluation of the I-SAF seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of these new intervention modalities on good governance and social accountability. The intervention duration is three years with the baseline survey administered in March 2017 and the endline survey expected to be implemented at the beginning of 2019.
