Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Nepal are the main driver of increasing public consciousness, ensuring political rights of citizens and advocate of human rights. The accountability and transparency within and outside of CSOs is much debated topics in Nepal. Both the government and CSOs heavily relying on foreign funding, thus accountability issue is often viewed from recipients’ obligations and compliances towards the donors. In order to challenge the existing discourse on CSO accountability, CSO organized a yearlong campaign on CSO accountability standard.
This campaign begins organizing a workshop in Kathmandu on 7 July 2017 under the title of “Accountability Practices within Civil Society Organization (CSOs) in Nepal: Problems & Prospects.” The workshop comprised of 33 participants in total from various international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as community based organizations. The workshop was intended to a) reflect on the existing accountability practices within CSOs of Nepal; b) share international experiences on CSO accountability practices and frameworks and identify their relevance to Nepal, and c) gather participant’s perspectives for designing a future roadmap for ensuring CSO accountability in Nepal. More detail about the workshop can be found here.
The campaign also involved knowledge and information exchange with local, national, and international CSOs on accountability standard, giving public lectures and presentations on these topics, and writing op-ed articles in the newspaper for public awareness.