ACCOUNTABILTY REPORT 2016-17 - Accountablenow
ACCOUNTABILTY REPORT 2016-17Empowering a more accountable, effectiveand innovative civil society
ContentsWhich accountability challenges keep CIVICUS’ Secretary General awake at night? . 3What drives CIVICUS’ work? How does the strategic planning translate into an organisationwide accountability framework? How does CIVICUS monitor progress against set objectivesand what are lessons learnt? (Cluster A, 1.1.-1.4., 2.2.) . 5How does CIVICUS identify and prioritise stakeholders? How does CIVICUS ensure itspartnerships are effective – maximising coordination and avoiding duplication? (Cluster B,4.1.-4.3.) . 7How is stakeholder engagement reflected in CIVICUS’ decision-making and how does itcontribute to change? (Cluster A, 2.1.; Cluster B, 5.1.-5.2.) . 11How does CIVICUS respond to stakeholder feedback? Which complaints did CIVICUS receivein 2016-2017 and how were these followed-up? (Cluster B, 5.3., Cluster C, 10.3.) . 13How is CIVICUS strengthening capacities that last beyond immediate interventions? (ClusterB, 5.4.) . 14How is CIVICUS ensuring diversity and inclusion in its Secretariat and programmes? (ClusterA, 3.1.-3.2.) . 16How does CIVICUS improve its environmental footprint? (Cluster A, 3.1.-3.2.) . 18How is CIVICUS’ advocacy work rooted in human rights and do-no-harm principles? How is itbased on the views of the affected people? (Cluster A, 3.1.-3.3.; Cluster B, 6.1.-6.2.) . 20How transparent is CIVICUS regarding its budgets, evaluations, policies, or remunerations?(Cluster B, 7.1.) . 21How does CIVICUS guarantee privacy rights and personal data of the people it works with?(Cluster B, 7.2.-7.3.) . 22How fair and transparent are CIVICUS’ recruitment, employment and staff developmentprocesses? (Cluster C, 8.1.-8.2.) . 23How does CIVICUS ensure sustainable and diversified resourcing as well as resourceallocation in line with strategic objectives? (Cluster C, 9.1.-9.2.) . 27How does CIVICUS deal with anti-corruption and financial controls? (Cluster C, 9.3.) . 28What does CIVICUS’ governance structure look like and how does it work in practice? (ClusterC, 10.1.-10.2.) . 30How does CIVICUS ensure an independent and effective oversight of its strategic direction,legal compliance, risk, and performance? (Cluster C, 11.1.) . 32How does CIVICUS Board and SLT take responsibility to meet the 12 AccountabilityCommitments? (Cluster C, 11.2.) . 32How is CIVICUS promoting the Accountability Commitments among staff and improvingperformance? (Cluster C, 11.3.) . 33Final Conclusions on CIVICUS’ Accountability Reporting . 342
Which accountability challenges keep CIVICUS’ SecretaryGeneral awake at night?If there was ever a time for civil society to show that we can beheld accountable for our actions, now is the time. With trust andconfidence in civil society falling in many parts of the world,political attacks on our legitimacy and high-profile shortcomingsin our practices, it feels more important than ever that we showleadership when it comes to accountability. This should be donein a dynamic, evolving way, where accountability is not a report,but a constructive relationship with stakeholders that improvesthe agency and credibility of civil society organisations.At CIVICUS, accountability means we are transparent about whowe are and what we do. It also means we answer to ourmembers, partners, donors, civil society and ourselves on whatwe have achieved and how we achieved it.This is underpinned by our new Accountability Framework that aims to: Position CIVICUS as an adaptive, change-seeking alliance.Put people at the centre of our work, enable more iterative and participatoryprogramming and allow faster responses when changes in direction are required.Work with mixed-method approaches to measure our contribution to socialtransformation.Recent safeguarding scandals, although involving specific organisations, have hadramifications affecting the entire civil society sector. Our 2018 State of Civil Society Reporthighlights the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, which have positively shone a spotlight onpatriarchy and sexual abuse in the entertainment, corporate and political worlds. It is high timethat we in civil society correct power imbalances and forge stronger links to our roots and tothe people that we profess to serve. This is particularly important in times of shrinking civicspace globally – as captured in the CIVICUS Monitor.2016-17 has been an exciting year for CIVICUS with major achievements in the followingareas: (more details are provided throughout the report) 32017-2022 Strategic Plan: We listened to thousands of members and partners acrossthe world to shape our strategic plan for 2017-2022. Through the consultation process,we heard people’s deep concerns about challenges facing humanity, how civil societycan best address these challenges, and how we can best work as a civil societyalliance to enact change.CIVICUS Membership: Our membership increased to 3,826 members by June 2017,coming from over 172 countries. The latest satisfaction survey shows that most of ourmembers are happy with the collaboration and support offered by the Secretariat.Note: Whilst this report covers our interaction with all CIVICUS members, the individualaccountability commitments of our members are beyond the scope of this report.Annual Budget: Our annual budget in 2016-2017 increased by ca. 20% from theprevious year, up to US 9,697,000; we also succeeded in diversifying our fundingsources and acquiring additional core funding.Organisational Re-shaping: As we prepared to enter our new strategic phase, wealso redesigned the structure of the CIVICUS Secretariat. CIVICUS has grown, bothin terms of financial and human resources, and, as such, the organisation needed amore streamlined leadership and more effective management forums. While thisprocess proved to be challenging during the transition phase, we can now see that, for
example, CIVICUS’ new cluster structure and the management forums have createdopportunities for more people to play leadership roles and act as spokespeople forCIVICUS. However, we are still learning how to work and communicate effectively inglobally dispersed teams. We also moved into a new office space (25 Owl Street,Auckland Park) in March 2017 which was necessary to accommodate the needs of agrowing CIVICUS team in Johannesburg, and to move to more open-plan styleworking.CIVICUS Workforce: Our staff numbers grew between 2016-2017 from 49 to 64employees as of 30 June 2017. The majority of our staff are still based at our globalheadquarters in Johannesburg, while we have growing numbers in our Geneva,London and New York offices, as well as in eight other countries around the world.We responded to the most recent recommendations from the Independent Review Panel indetail (here) but would like to highlight the newest developments: As encouraged by theIndependent Review Panel, the CIVICUS Board has approved an external FeedbackResponse Policy (January 2018) and is actively inviting feedback and complaints via anew online form. It is too early to draw conclusions from this, but we are positive that this willhelp us to be more accountable to the people we work with. Another recommendation fromour 2015-2016 report was to strengthen our diversity and inclusion efforts. We have setourselves targets regarding inclusive hiring and promotion practices and we also conductedan annual gender pay gap analysis.We also implemented a number of policies such as a new Breastfeeding Policy andRecruitment Policy that will help us put into practice our diversity and inclusion commitments.An Anti-Discrimination Policy will be presented to the Board early in 2018-2019. The Boardapproved of a new Environmental Policy and this report provides an overview of our carbonfootprint development over years in a way that depicts changes more clearly. Finally, staffhave been regularly reminded of the importance of CIVICUS’ Fraud Prevention Policy andInformation Privacy Policy. The Finance Cluster is also currently exploring options of a newaccounting system which is better aligned to a larger CIVICUS.As CIVICUS celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2018, we would like to thank our members,partners, Board members, and colleagues – past and present – who have shaped CIVICUSover the last 25 years. Also thank you to Accountable Now and the Independent Review Panelfor being a part of that journey. And here’s to many more years of strengthening citizen actionacross the world.Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah(Secretary General, CIVICUS)4
What drives CIVICUS’ work? How does the strategic planningtranslate into an organisation-wide accountability framework?How does CIVICUS monitor progress against set objectives andwhat are lessons learnt? (Cluster A, 1.1.-1.4., 2.2.)CIVICUS’ vision is “a worldwide community ofinformed, inspired, committed citizens engaged inconfronting the challenges facing humanity”. Ourmission is “to strengthen citizen action and civilsociety throughout the world”. Based on thesefundamental values, we entered a new strategicplanning phase in 2016-2017, listening tothousands of members and partners across theworld to co-create our Strategic Plan for 20172022. Our goals are:1. Defending Civic Freedoms & DemocraticFreedoms2. Strengthening the Power of People toOrganise, Mobilise and Take Action3. Empowering a More Accountable, Effectiveand Innovative Civil Society4. Building a World-Class OrganisationYou can read and download the full Strategic Planin six languages and watch videos here.CIVICUS’ new Accountability Framework was developed to help consistently andsystematically track the organisation’s progress and impact against the new Strategic Plan,meet accountability commitments and enable organisational learning. It is groundedin Utilisation-focused Evaluation, recognising that in complex environments, where socialchange is difficult to measure and attribute to one single effort, evaluation needs to bepurpose-driven.In order to help understand CIVICUS’ contribution in the complex social environments withinwhich the organisation works, CIVICUS’ Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and the Impact &Accountability Cluster have developed a series of long term critical learning questions to helpstaff understand the impact of its work under each of the Strategic Goals. The intention is tounderstand, not only whether CIVICUS is progressing according to these plans, but also tounderstand what activities in which contexts are working well and where CIVICUS may needto change course and adapt.The Accountability Framework and Performance Story (submitted to the Panel along with thisreport) are the basis for CIVICUS’ biannual Impact Reflection Process which will take placefor the first time in July 2018:5
Since CIVICUS is only ending its first year of the new Strategic Plan while writing this report,it is difficult to share comprehensive successes and learnings at this early stage. CIVICUS’notable wins with regard to innovation and collaboration in 2016-2017 are outlined in theAnnual Report 2016-2017 which we suggest reading along with this report.In addition to our regular monitoring and reporting, the Swedish International DevelopmentCooperation Agency (Sida) commissioned an external evaluation of CIVICUS’ organisationalcapacity in relation to the demands posed by the new Strategic Plan, and analysed synergyand complementarity with a particular focus on the Civic Space Initiative (CSpI) and theInnovation for Change programme. Please read their findings and recommendations here aswell as CIVICUS’ management response/action plan (submitted to the Panel along with thisreport).Other evaluations in 2016-2017 included the assessment of our network and membershipengagement (please find more details later in the report), an external evaluation of theDataShift initiative, an external evaluation of the governance of the Innovation for Changenetwork, and an organisational mapping tool assessment linked to the Ford BUILD Grant. Asfor CSpI, CIVICUS and its consortium partners are applying Outcome Harvesting to evaluateand monitor progress against set indicators and objectives. This is in line with CIVICUS’approach to Utilisation-focused Evaluation and the report on 2017-2018 will share insightsfrom this work.As part of this strategic planning process, CIVICUS consulted members, partners, and adiverse range of civil society colleagues over several months on whether and how theorganisation should reorganise in support of the new Strategic Goals. From theseconsultations, several priorities emerged, including the need for: 6More streamlined, and distributed leadership modelSmaller, more focused teams for more effective delivery and integration of offsite staffForums for better planning, implementation, coordination and quality control ofactivitiesIntegration of stand-alone projects and a system for incubating new activities withinthe organisationRedeploying consultancy and short-term project staff within the core structure, whenappropriate
Now that CIVICUS is one year into the new strategy and nearly one year into the new structure(which was almost fully staffed from September 2017), the organisation will undergo a reviewof the reshaping process to see if/how the current structure is addressing priorities.This new plan presented a timelyopportunity for CIVICUS to re-organise theLOOKING AHEAD:Secretariat in support of these newAs of June 2018, CIVICUS is storing andStrategic Goals. The re-structuringanalysing its data using DevResults, a webfocused on creating more streamlinedbased M&E system that tracks CIVICUS’leadership for the organisation whichprogramme and organisational data. Thisincludes a smaller leadership team (Seniorplatform will house the majority of the dataLeadership Team) but with opportunitiesthat CIVICUS collects in one central place,for more colleagues to play managementfurther enabling data-driven decisionand coordination roles (Programmemaking. The next Accountability Report onManagement Forum and Operational2017-2018 will thus be able to provide moreManagement Forum). As is usually thedata-heavy evidence on our performance.casewhenimplementingnewmanagement structures, a lesson learntfor CIVICUS has been the importance to document and clarify the scope and make up of theseforums to ensure consistency and transparency around aspects such as membership anddecision-making remits. All three of these structures have found it necessary to create termsof reference to provide this clarity both within these structures and to the wider staff. Moreinformation about the restructure of the CIVICUS Secretariat can be found later in this report.How does CIVICUS identify and prioritise stakeholders? Howdoes CIVICUS ensure its partnerships are effective – maximisingcoordination and avoiding duplication? (Cluster A 1.4., Cluster B, 4.1.-4.3.)CIVICUS’ primary mission is to strengthen citizen action and civil society throughout the world.CIVICUS’ definition of civil society is broad, including non-governmental organisations(NGOs), activists, civil society coalitions and networks, protest and social movements,voluntary bodies, campaigning organisations, charities, faith-based groups, trade unions, andphilanthropic foundations, among others. CIVICUS’ membership is diverse, spanning a widerange of issues, sizes and organisation types.CIVICUS is a membership alliance which continuously grows and stands at 3,826 membersin 172 countries as of 30 June 2017. The table below illustrates the current configuration ofCIVICUS membership and changes since June 2016. The figures show a modest growth inour membership, with a stable voting membership base.7Membership categoriesJune 2016June 2017Associate Individuals2,4422,670Associate Organisations903984Total Associate:3,3453,654Voting Individuals4030Voting Organisations177142Total Voting:217172Total:3,5623,826Countries covered:176172
Most of CIVICUS’ membership is based in the Global South, with significant representationfrom Africa, Asia and Latin America. Fifty out of the 54 African countries are represented inour membership. Voting members (organisation and individual) come from 66 of the 172countries represented in the membership. The chart below illustrates the proportions of totalmembership and voting members drawn from the various geographical regions.45%40%35%30%25%20%15%10%5%0%Asia, Middle EastAfricaAmericas, LatinAmerica,CaribbeanPercentage of Total MembershipEuropeOceaniaPercentage of Voting MembersAn ongoing challenge remains that voting members are mostly from higher income countrieswhereas CIVICUS strives to be a truly global network. The new Member Engagement Strategyseeks to address potential power imbalances (see more details later in this report). Forexample, membership fees for voting members are now (June 2018) optional for individualsand organisations with an income of less than US 80,000. Forthcoming reports will presenthow the voting membership will change based on the new strategy.Members meet once a year at CIVICUS’ Annual General Meeting (AGM) which took placefrom 28th November to 2nd December 2016 (virtually). The virtual AGM format was first testedin 2015 to be more inclusive of members across time zones and geographies who could notphysically attend. Over the past few years, CIVICUS has tried to include more opportunitiesfor member participation beyond approving the annual reports. These included Q&A sessionswith the Secretary General and the Board’s Governance and Membership Committee Chair,recorded video messages, chat groups and polls. While these efforts have enabled CIVICUSto engage more members, the quality of the engagement does not compare to a physicalAGM. For this reason, CIVCUS will, for the first time in 2018, utilise a hybrid format that allowsboth virtual and physical participation in a Board-led AGM.Members and other stakeholders also convene every 18 months as part of the InternationalCivil Society Week (ISCW) and aligned World Assembly. However, no ISCW or WorldAssembly took place in the reporting period (but in April 2016 in Colombia and in December2017 in Fiji).CIVICUS believes that the organisation and alliance are stronger when working towards thesame goal together with other actors, whilst ensuring to not compete with or displace localpartners. CIVICUS aims at supporting and complementing the work of local civil societythrough the organisation’s resources and knowledge, regarding itself as a network andknowledge broker. CIVICUS continuously tries to bring local concerns and voices to a globallevel, as well as to bridge sectors and other differences to identify common goals andopportunities.8
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What drives CIVICUS’ work? How does the strategic planning translate into an organisation-wide accountability framework? How does CIVICUS monitor progress against set objectives and what are lessons learnt? (Cluster A, 1.1.-1.4., 2.2.) CIVICUS’ vision is “a worldwide community of informed, inspired, committed citizens engaged in
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How does the strategic planning translate into an organisation-wide accountability framework? CIVICUS’ Accountability Framework was updated in November 2018 to help consistently and systematically track the organisation’s progress and impact against the new Strategic Plan, meet accountability commitments and enable organisational learning.
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