ICT for Social Accountability

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 The course addresses new and affordable technologies that can help to bridge information gaps and to open new avenues for citizen feedback on public. When ICTs are combined with social accountability approaches, they can enhance efforts to improve monitoring of service delivery and reduce leakages of public funds.

The course “ICT for Social Accountability” will give participants an overview on the theory and key concepts underpinning the idea of Social Accountability before providing an overview of some of the most commonly-used ICT tools to support social accountability. The e-learning course offers practical knowledge to strengthen participants’ capacity to understand these tools within the context of broader transparency and accountability strategies as well as facilitate peer to peer knowledge exchange and south-south learning.

There are three modules in this course: (1) Introduction to Social Accountability, (2) Adding ICTs to the Social Accountability Equation, and (3) ICT Tools for Enhancing Social Accountability. Participants completing the on-line instruction and attending all the VC sessions will be awarded with a certificate offered by WBI.

Course Description

• Theoretical approach to the links between access to information, Open Data, and ICTs;
• Practical demonstrations of selected ICT tools: scraping, data visualization, crowd-sourcing, mobile phones, and social media; and
• Videos, reading material, and other resources about current and past ICT initiatives that are geared toward social accountability.

Objectives

• Provide practitioners with ideas and tools to incorporate ICTs innovations in their work portfolios on social accountability;
• Foster the involvement of demand side of governance actors in current ICT for accountability and transparency projects and initiatives; and
• Foster South–South knowledge exchanges on ICTs for accountability in target countries.

By the end of the course participants should be able to:

• Understand and articulate the basic tenets of social accountability
• Identify and explain key ICT tools and approaches
• Analyze which tools would be most effective to implement in their local context or in their specific area of interest
• Design/present action plans that describe how they are proposing to choose appropriate tools to apply to a give operating environment.