The Executive Director of STAR-Ghana Foundation, Ibrahim-Tanko Amidu, has urged civil society to adopt a double-edged approach in their advocacy work.
He said their work must not just focus on reporting to align with the objectives and requirements of their donors but also geared towards development effectiveness.
According to Alhaji Tanko, civil society actors often force themselves to pick up positives, where perhaps it might have been more useful for them if they focused on the challenges.
“We are always focusing on what has worked because that is what the donor wants to hear. But if we do that, we lose sight of very important lessons. What hasn’t worked, what didn’t work, why didn’t it work? How do we use that moving forward.
“Donors don’t incentivise that type of learning, so we go through all kinds of concoctions to glean some results. As we move forward, we should be clear on what we want to learn or else we will go through endless learning workshops and not much coming out of it,” he said during a STAR-Ghana Foundation end of phase learning event for grant partners under the Gender Rights and Empowerment programme (G-REP), with funding from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), at Aburi in the Eastern Region.
He challenged civil society organisations to move beyond learning for contractual purposes, to learning beyond donor demands and for development effectiveness.
Some participants in the meeting
Civil society legitimacy
According to Tanko, a lot of questions are being asked about the legitimacy and accountability of civil society.
In the public perception, he said, civil society is only good at taking donors money, doing what is flagged as priority and just accounting to donors.
However, he said that proper learning enables civil society to be more accountable downwards to the partners that they work with, communities that are receiving the service, and downwards to the actors that they are engaging.
“If we don’t learn we can’t respond to the dynamisms of our context. As a country we are going to the IMF for the 17th time – what have we learned about the role of civil society in protecting the rights of the disadvantaged?
“Ghana is almost at the verge of signing a contract with the IMF and where are the voices of civil society? What have we learned about the effect of the IMF projects on access to services. Learning is key in responding to the dynamic context,” he said.
Learning event
The learning event brought together all 18 grant partners under the GREP for a learning and knowledge exchange and to reflect, renew and re-focus strategies to contribute to increased access to rights and quality social services for women and girls.
In addition, the event served as a platform to inform, influence, and strengthen implementation for subsequent phases.
