Civil Society can play an important role in anti-corruption work

Corruption affects the lives of everyone – and citizen groups (CSOs) are willing and able to do something about it.
The Partnership for Transparency (PTF) has been supporting local CSOs around the world in such efforts for almost 25 years through 280+ projects across 55 countries.
One of the most effective ways for citizens to engage is to monitor the delivery of public services or of public procurement: citizen oversight of public sector activities increases transparency, integrity, and accountability – leading to better results: improved quality of services delivered or better value for money in public procurement.

Achieving results and making them sustainable

In our experience, under the right conditions and with the capable partners, achieving short term success is often feasible. Even though uncovering problems and fixing them at the local level is far from simple, identifying problems and finding a solution is often a straightforward task – and we have many examples of successful interventions.
The real challenge is to achieve sustainable results: making changes that will permanently improve the situation. Not only fixing a local problem – but making sure that the solution is not undermined after the project is over. Better yet – changing the system that led to the problem in the first place

Our Concept: a country approach to establish an “ecosystem of CSO monitoring”

Together with our local partner, IDIS “Viitorul”, PTF has been implementing a 5-year project in the Republic of Moldova to “Increase the Integrity of Public Procurement”. Using a phased approach, we are implementing the project in four stages:

1. Inception: understanding the situation, stakeholders and planning the program
2. Training: capacitating CSOs and investigative Journalists to monitor public procurement
3. Monitoring: supporting CSOs and investigative journalists to monitor public procurement processes and setting up structures to foster building coalitions, share knowledge and lessons learned.
4. Policy Dialogue: setting up a multi-stakeholder dialogue of key stakeholders to ensure findings identified by CSO monitors lead to real (i.e., systemic and sustainable) change.

Particular about this project is the fact that it is a long-term program, using a phased approach to build foundations with increasingly meaningful results: from strengthened capacity of CSOs to case-based findings of procedures that are monitored in the project – to systemic changes through coalition building.

In this video you will learn about:

1. CSO monitoring: success factors for CSO monitoring (based on a review of 15 projects between 2006 and 2020 in the health sector)
2. Country approach: our concept for achieving sustainable change through a country program focused on building coalitions (based on the current program in Moldova)