The Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA) is pleased to announce its 4th global Call for Proposals (CfP) for civil society organizations (CSOs) and CSO networks.

GPSA has invited its 53 opted-in countries, through the World Bank’s country management units, to express interest to participate in the CfP. The application process is now open for CSOs in the following shortlist of countries and developing themes:

•     Benin: Human Capital: Nutrition
•     Brazil: Prevention of Crime and Violence
•     The Caribbean: Resilience and Environment
•     Madagascar: Human Capital: Education or Health
•     Ukraine: Anti-corruption

Grant objectives

Grants are intended to provide strategic and sustained support to CSO projects with the following objectives:

• Addressing critical governance and development challenges through social accountability processes that involve citizen feedback and participatory methodologies geared to helping governments and public-sector institutions address these challenges. Special emphasis is on problems that affect extreme poor and marginalized populations.
• Strengthening civil society’s capacities for social accountability by investing in CSOs’ institutional strengthening and through mentoring of small, nascent CSOs by well-established, larger CSOs with a track record on social accountability.The GPSA will prioritize proposals that a) are implemented by CSOs’ networks, alliances or partnerships, b) include on-granting from lead implementing CSO and CSO partners.

Grant selection

The call prioritizes collaborative social accountability approaches, with the objective of generating systematic citizen feedback and its use by public sector institutions at the local, state and federal levels. Collaborative social accountability consists of inclusive citizen participation processes, whereby civil society organizations (CSOs) facilitate collaborative problem-solving spaces between citizens, particularly marginalized and vulnerable groups, and public sector institutions responsible for decision-making. The information produced should be used to introduce corrective measures and improvements in policy-making and implementation, including responses co-produced and co-implemented between citizens and the public sector.

Proposals will have to demonstrate that they will use inclusive participation approaches to engage citizens, particularly marginalized and vulnerable groups, in generating systematic feedback and engaging them in collaborative problem-solving. They will also have to link participatory mechanisms to ongoing initiatives led by public sector institutions at the local, state and federal levels aimed at reforming governance in public security. Proposed interventions may combine a target geographic area but must be clearly linked to (1) public sector initiatives at higher levels (state or federal), and (2) the possibility of scaling up such mechanisms to cover larger geographic areas. The high-level objective will be to contribute to increasing transparency, accountability and inclusive citizen participation in the relevant sectors, as well as improving state and civil society capacities, knowledge and learning on the use of collaborative social accountability mechanisms in the sectors outlined in the national thematic descriptions.

Grant size

GPSA Grant amounts will range from US$400,000 to US$500,000 over a period of three to four years. However, requests for funding below this range will also be considered, and the total amount granted may be lower than US$400,000 to US$500,000. The total envelope for this CfP is approximately $US3 million dollars, with additional funds expected to be raised from other partners, mostly at the national level.

Eligibility

Only applications in the shortlisted countries within the descripted national theme will be eligible.

CSOs include legal entities that fall outside the public or private sectors, such as non-government organizations, not-for-profit media organizations, charitable organizations, faith-based organizations, professional organizations, labor unions, workers’ organizations, associations of elected local representatives, foundations and policy development and research institutes.

Criteria used by the GPSA for shortlisting of countries

The criteria the GPSA used for shortlisting countries included:

•     Government and World Bank country management demand in a given country, as well as alignment with the World Bank’s Country Partnership Framework;
•     Synergies with current and pipeline World Bank operations;
•     The potential to raise or leverage funds complementary to those of the GPSA.

The focus of this CfP is “Innovative and transformative use of social accountability to solve critical governance and development challenges”. Specific themes are being prioritized for each country, following a menu based on the GPSA’s mission and track record:

• Governance themes: Public finance and budget, anti-corruption and oversight institutions (notably Supreme Audit Institutions), decentralization and local governance, and domestic resource management.
• Governance in sectors: Education, health, social protection, agriculture and water. Synergies with the Human Capital Project will be of great interest.
• Fragility, Conflict and Violence-afflicted (FCV) settings: Risk mitigation of IDA investments through civil society-led third-party monitoring; improving responsiveness in public service delivery and strengthening the enabling environment for conflict prevention and social cohesion.
• Frontier themes: Climate change, GovTech & CivicTech, and social inclusion.

A complete overview of the steps in the GPSA’s Call for Proposals and project selection process can be accessed here.