Simon Koolwijk

‘Citizens are not afraid anymore to demand for their entitlements! Health service providers do listen better to the demands of their patients. The quality of the health care has significantly improved last year. The treatments have improved, people started to talk positively about the service in the clinic, service providers keep their time schedules, the ambulance service is 24 hours available, hygiene practices have improved and the clinic is clean.’ This is one of the change stories, which was shared by citizens, service providers and government officials who participated in a participatory video intervention facilitated by Redeem The Generation (RTG), a local civil society organization who supports social accountability processes in various municipalities in Ethiopia.  For the whole story consult video:   Behavioral change and service improvements on health care in Matehare, Ethiopia . Social Accountability Social Accountability is a process where cit...

As part of its communication, monitoring and evaluation strategy, the Ethiopian Social Accountability Program Phase 2, organised a participatory video, a most significant change story and social accountability committee hero competition. In each category around 25 organisations each participated. The final award ceremony took place on the 4th November, 2015 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The event gave a platform for the actual social accountability implementers to be awarded. The event was attended by more than 250 participants and representatives from national and international media. Watch the video;  

Practical tools! It will help to focus my work as community worker! Very efficient to mobilize people and make people to move on issues they consider as important. Students from the University of Social Work of Hogeschool Utrecht - Amersfoort shared their experiences at the end of a two day training on methods for citizens' participation. On the 29th October and 5th November 2008 thirteen students got acquainted with basic facilitation methods on how to stimulate citizen's participation. Students got acquainted with the theory and principles of citizen's participation, and got acquainted with a number of basic facilitation methods for engaging and activating groups, called the Technology of Participation . The Technology of Participation methods have been developed by the Institute of Cultural Affairs . From the early 50's up to late 60's a lot of experiments and pilots were done with a number of community development based methods. One of the most successfull p...