ODC visit to Information for Citizens (I4Cs)’ meeting in the Romeas Haek district, Svay Rieng province

With the assistant from STAR Kampuchea (SK), at the weekend, 19th May 2018, ODC team visited an implementation activity on the ground. The visit aimed to learn the process of Implementation of Social Accountability Framework in public services.

It is a sunny and humid Saturday afternoon when around 30 people of the Chong Preak village of the Andoung Pou commune (Svay Rieng province) met at a local meeting spot. They all came together to discuss community the activity of accountability facilitators (CAFs) – volunteers fostering sustainable public service delivery in the commune. Such meetings organised under the auspices of STAR Kampuchea (SK) are known as ‘I4Cs’ (which comes from ‘Information for citizens’). They are inaugural part of the Implementation Plan of the Social Accountability Framework (I-SAF), which aims to disseminate information and raise awareness of citizens on the public service delivery – i.e. issues like health, education and commune administration – and the roles it plays.

The body of participants mostly comprised of women carefully listened to two CAFs covering most important issued for about 2.5 hours. As representatives of the entire area, the two presenters were proud of the fact that so many interested people attended the event, which was conducted for the first time in the village. The main reason for many participants to come to the meeting was to learn about local budget, how it was supposed to be used, and what the role of the CAFs was. Needless to say, such an open discussion never occured in the village before.  This was mostly due to the fact that budget procedures were not easy to follow for the villagers. That is why the SPIDER-funded ‘Improving the delivery of public services through the use of information and communications technology’ programme was launched to change this.

One of the meeting’s participants expressed her happiness to take part in the event, as it makes her aware of things happening in her community. She also looked forward to joining the next one, as she said as follows:

A participant expressed her opinion in joining this event.

“I attended this meeting today because I never knew what is going on in my commune before. This meeting was very informative and I learnt a lot from it. […] The first benefit is that now I learned that my commune owned some budget, what expenses which the budget was used for. I never knew the cost of birth certificates, etc. before. This event made me aware of these things. The process of getting the certificates is not long and the authorities do not require anything and it does not cost anything. For the commune budget, I never realized that there was more than 290 million riels in my commune. And I never knew about the spendings. And now I learned it from this meeting. For instance, the costs of road development contributing to the whole community […] supporting kindergarten in my community. Another thing is that the budget is used for supporting pregnancy and conducting health checkup. After having learned about this support from the commune budget, I feel thankful. […] I would like to suggest to organise this awareness raising event again, so that people in my village including me will be more aware. This first time meeting just made me realize these things. Next time we will understand more about it and we can raise questions. We did not raise questions this time, as it is our very first time and we just start considering all this. This is why we did not dare to ask questions, as we were are afraid of asking inappropriate ones.”

This generally demonstrated the improvements achieved in the Andong Pour commune. Having observed real change, SK appointed CAFs as main contact persons of the I-SAF process on the ground. They have shown a strong motivation and commitment to change their communities. For example, Sreylen, a grade 12 student in living in Andong Pour commune has been as a CAF member for about 6 months. She expressed her motivation of being a CAF as the one owing primarily to the improvements  she observed in her commune after having this project in place. She is very enthusiastic to be part of the change when seeing the improvement of services in her community:

A community accountability facilitator expressed about her motivation.

‘Being a CAF, I can volunteer in helping the commune. At first, we should bring the concerns of the citizens to authorities and vice versa, so that they can work together for solutions at a right time. Apart from that, as a CAF, I have gained new experiences. […] Although I am not the most experience participant, the most important changes I observed were the behaviour of citizens who became more aware of their rights and information of the services they are accessing. Regarding the improvement of service providers, it does not mean that those providers did not play their roles before the SK started the project. However, the most important thing is that the service providers became more confident in providing services. They built a good relationship with citizens, which became even stronger after the SK project was launched.’

After this awareness raising event conducted in other villages, CAFs will keep up doing their work and organise a number of other activities, such as e.g. citizen monitoring with scorecards, interface meeting with communities, etc.

Participants are paying attention to the community accountability facilitator (CAF).

Apart from just being the coordinator of the project and providing training to citizen journalists, student journalists and conventional journalists, the ODC team also offers some trainings to CAFs on specific target areas, e.g. on how to access public service information on its platform, which appears to be very useful and informative for them.

This field visit to see the implementation of public service delivery on the ground was very informative, as the ODC team had a change to have a face to face conversation with villagers and CAFs where are engaged with and part of I-SAF implementation. ODC will continue on having another visit for other I-SAF events next time.