The Civic Engagement for Accountability and Democracy in Zimbabwe (CEADZ) is a four-year program, currently in its third year of implementation. The program seeks to increase the influence of Zimbabwean citizens, acting collectively through formal and informal groups, for more democratic and accountable governance. To fulfil its objectives, CEADZ has been providing technical support to civic actors in Zimbabwe, mainly civil society organizations (CSOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs), to promote sustained civic-solution holder engagement for improved transparency, answerability, and accountability with notable success. The program’s interventions are linked to the basic understanding that Social Accountability Monitoring (SAM) has the potential of increasing and sustaining citizens participation in governance processes to improve transparency and accountability at multiple levels. Social Accountability constitutes the range of measures and mechanisms—beyond the ballot box—that involve citizens in holding the state to account, i.e. justify and explain its actions, or lack thereof.
The CEADZ approach to SAM is underpinned by a rights-based approach to public resource management- a method developed, tested and pioneered by the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM) at Rhodes University in Grahamstown South Africa. The PSAM approach places Social Accountability to tackling systemic dysfunction rather than individual instances of corruption or mismanagement by focusing on strengthening the systems necessary to ensure effective public resource management (PRM). Considering this, it has theorized that there are five distinct processes of the public resource management framework and that these are “indispensable prerequisites for the realization of basic human needs within any state. The Social Accountability System is hinged on monitoring five interlinked and interconnected public resource management processes that are used by states to deliver services for their citizens. The five processes in monitoring Social Accountability, as conceptualized by PSAM, are Planning and Resource Allocation, Expenditure Management, Performance Management, Public Integrity Management and Oversight by the legislature and supreme audit institutions.
