Community Based Scorecards (CBS)

Donors: ARD/Planning and Local Governance Project in Albania (PLGP) and UN Women

Period: 01.06.2016-31.07.2017

The project is built on one of the fundamental principles of a democratic society: the participation of citizens in public life. This participation can be measured in two ways: their participation in elections (representative democracy) and their direct participation (participatory democracy). The first form (representative democracy) is exercised through the right to vote and the right to be elected. The second form (participatory democracy) is exercised through the actions and mechanisms that citizens, communities, media and  civil society organizations employ to achieve involvement in the drafting, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of local policies and the services delivered to their community.  In the moment that this project was incepted, the Albanian society is one year after the Local Elections (2015) organized under the new Territorial Administrative Reform (TAR) and one year prior to the upcoming Parliamentary Elections (2017).

Overall objective:

The main aim was to promote and support good governance, local social accountability and community empowerment through participation, accountability, responsiveness and informed decision making. The core implementation strategy to achieve the goal is using informed communication and dialogue in participatory processes that engage both duty barriers and right holders, Municipal officials, citizen’s commissions and citizens as the main target groups and multipliers.

Specific objectives:

• To establish new CBS in sixteen LGUs. The methodology used will be Community Based Scorecards (CBS) which is a community-based  monitoring tool that is a hybrid technique of social audit, community monitoring, and citizen report cards.
• To monitor and advocate for CBS implementation in four LGUs Tirana, Elbasan, Vlora and Berat the methodology used will be Logic Model in order to evaluate what has been done previously and to recommend further step for strengthening the citizen’s voice. This methodology will be further developed with the UN Women and USAID representatives.
• To promote and advocate for the CBS in national level the methodology will be focus to different meeting, using the tools in disposition such as Law for Consultation and Law for Information, lobbying and advocating methods engaging groups of citizens from each target municipality. We will treat local authorities not only as project crucial partners but as well as target group of the project. We aim to raise the awareness of these structures on the importance of sustainable strategies of including public in decision making to the benefit of social and economic sustainable development and good governance. The direct target group of the project are citizens, local organizations, local authorities, media  of 16 targeted regions.

Project achievements: