Tuesday, November 2, 2010

World Bank launches PRAN

The World Bank today launched a new initiative — the Programme for Accountability in Nepal (PRAN) that is a capacity development programme aimed at enhancing knowledge and skills of diverse constituencies to promote greater accountability of government institutions and programmes.
The PRAN that will become operational in the coming months will support social accountability activities in three areas: public financial management, municipal governance, andpublic service delivery.
Under its capacity development component, the programme will offer training, mentoring and other skills-building opportunities to interested civil society and government actors.
Its grant-making window will provide grants to civil society organisations and community associations to develop and implement social accountability initiatives.
It will work closely with both state and non-state actors such as civil society organisations (CSO), media, research groups, Parliament committees and government units working on anti-corruption, to increase their capacity to work together to improve the transparency, responsiveness and accountability of processes of governance and public service delivery through the implementation of mechanisms of social accountability.
Today’s launch event presented a number of examples of the types of practices and tools that citizens, civil society and government actors can use to promote social accountability including, for example, independent budget analysis, participatory public expenditure tracking, civil society oversight of public procurement processes, social audits and community-led monitoring and evaluation of public services.
Examples from around the world show that such practices can bring important benefits in terms of fighting corruption, enhancing the efficiency and quality of public services, empowering citizens and improving civil society-state relations.
In order to showcase the numerous social accountability initiatives that are on-going in Nepal, today’s event also included a Social Accountability Share Fair, which highlighted more than 20 such initiatives from across the country.

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