Accountability

NGO Accountability

NGOs are accountable to multiple constituencies, including donors, the public, their boards of directors and staff, partners and the people they serve or represent.

InterAction promotes accountability within our own community in several different ways, through:

• PVO Standards [1]: To join and remain a part of InterAction, member organizations must adhere to, and report compliance on, InterAction’s Private Voluntary Organization (PVO) Standards. These standards help ensure that members are accountable in the vital areas of financial management, fundraising, governance and program performance. InterAction members must certify compliance every two years.

  As practices or the environment in which our members operate change, InterAction updates its standards. Our Gifts-in-Kind Working Group recently revised the standards on medical supplies and food aid, and is now reviewing our standards on educational materials. For more information, please contact Taina Alexander [2].

• Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness [3]: This international initiative [4], led by civil society organizations (CSOs), is focused on defining and promoting principles essential to the effectiveness of CSOs. These are principles to which CSOs will hold themselves accountable, and to which they wish to be held accountable by the constituencies they serve and represent, other CSOs and donors. In September 2010, after a global consultation process involving thousands of CSOs, civil society representatives from around the world endorsed the eight Istanbul Principles for CSO Development Effectiveness [5]. InterAction is a member of the Open Forum’s Global Facilitation Group.
• Monitoring & Evaluation [6]: NGOs, donors and program participants want to know if development and humanitarian interventions are on track and producing intended results. InterAction supports consistent and rigorous M&E [6] practices to help enable our members be accountable to their multiple stakeholders. For more information, please contact Laia Grino [7].
• Transparency [8]: Transparency is a precondition for accountability. InterAction promotes transparency among our members through NGO Aid Map, an initiative focused on collecting information on NGOs' work at the project level and making it accessible to donors, NGOs, businesses, governments and the public through an online, interactive mapping tool. For more information about InterAction’s transparency work, please contact Laia Grino [7].

Donor Accountability

In addition to NGO accountability, InterAction promotes donor accountability through our work on aid and development effectiveness [9]. This work seeks to improve donors’ accountability to recipient governments, communities and civil society; to ensure donors are more transparent about how aid is spent; and to hold them accountable for achieving development results. In recent international agreements, such as the 2005 Paris Declaration [10], the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action [11], and the 2011 Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation [12], donors have committed to implementing a variety of measures aimed at increasing the effectiveness of aid, including improvements in mutual accountability, accountability to those intended to benefit from aid, and transparency.