Accountability
The PrincipleWhere Does Accountable Development Works Come From?
Our focus on Accountability comes from our organizations’ experience with the challenges of development, as well as the vigorous contemporary debate about what development itself should mean.
There is some contention about what “global development” means amongst governments, Non-Governmental Organizations and regular people. It strikes us at Accountable Development Works that any good definition of this term should appeal to our sense of equality. If “global development” entails interventions into the lives of the vulnerable and the impoverished , it is surely because we see something fundamentally wrong with a world where one’s opportunities, freedoms and physical conditions are determined differently depending on where you are born. Just as race or gender should not determine our lot in life, neither should our nationality. So, for us at Accountable Development Works, the basic moral notion that people everywhere are equal, and deserve equal opportunities, freedoms and rights regardless of nationality, is what underlies our vision of “global development.” It also gives developed countries a reason to be concerned about helping underdeveloped ones.
Equality As An Ethical Motive
This notion of everyone being equal is pretty standard amongst humanitarian and development organizations. However, equality as an ethical motive also needs to inform the way we operate when trying to achieve it. This is simply to say that if we really believe that all people everywhere are of equal human worth, then it must also be reflected in our organizations and efforts.
How We Started
Accountable Development Works was started because our members experienced that equality is too often referenced as a motive for action regarding development, but then quickly forgotten as organizations and people from developed countries exert a top-down sort of planning which leaves the people they are trying to help left out of the decision making process.
How We Operate
In a unique and unconventional approach, we involve the people in the underdeveloped countries we are trying to help in the decision making process every step of the way. We operate on the basis that development must reflect its underlying moral inspiration of human equality by involving everyone – men, women, children and especially the people in underdeveloped countries we are trying to help – as staff, volunteers, stakeholders and decision makers. Our projects are therefore made initially and constantly accountable to beneficiaries (as well as donors) through our work with inclusive community based organizations and their locally driven, debated , and designed projects.
