In 2023 Accountability Lab Nigeria made significant strides in advancing accountability in the country; collaborating with stakeholders, building power for citizens in local communities, and expanding their reach to enhance accountability in governance.

We chatted with the Lab’s Country Director, Odeh Friday, about his journey to the Lab, the value of a translocal network, and the challenges of building sustainable local structures for accountability in a funding environment that favors quick wins.

Before joining Accountability Lab, Odeh worked in direct aid response, delivering healthcare, livelihood, and other humanitarian services to communities in need. It was while delivering food aid to Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps around Nigeria that he experienced the misappropriation of food meant for communities ravaged by insurgency.

“A foundation had sent bags of rice to a couple of IDP camps, and we got reports that government officials were stealing those bags of rice for themselves instead of giving them to communities that had nothing to eat. This was the height of the problem to me, lack of accountability,” he says.

Odeh moved to find a niche that could tackle the misappropriation that had left him so aghast. He found that governance and accountability work, when enacted effectively, could keep the kind of graft he had seen from happening. A culture of supporting community activists without being prescriptive, naming and faming positive role models, and engaging creatively with young people drew Odeh to Accountability Lab.

One of the issues AL Nigeria unearthed was a need for oil-producing communities to be paid their dividends by oil companies. According to Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Act, companies need to contribute 3% of their expenses to a Host Community Development Trust Fund. The Lab works with 9 oil-producing communities across three states in the country, but communities are not homogenous and building partnerships and trust is a complex and time-intensive process. The Lab encounters a range of local actors with misaligned interests; leadership that may be receiving only partial dividends but are reluctant to upset the applecart, those eager for individual benefits, and even those who might have the community’s best interests at heart but don’t trust the intentions of Lab and require convincing. On the other side are petroleum companies which have been slow to respond to Freedom of Information requests and questions about their legal obligations toward oil-producing communities.

“Communities have their already-established engagement with oil companies, but many don’t engage with policy and laws, so don’t fully benefit from the dividendsowed to them,” he says.

This is where Community Frontline Associates (CFAs) come in. Whether recommended by leaders or activists in their own right, CFAs are community actors invested in the development of the community but may not know how to go about it. They play a big role in bringing prominent community members on board with the process and engage with the Lab on how to navigate issues.

“I appreciate our [AL’s] approach. We don’t claim to have the solutions. We can facilitate the process but for sustainability purposes you [the community] has to own the process”

Sustainability doesn’t come easy and funding models generally don’t support working the long way around. Trust-building and co-creation of solutions – the building blocks of sustainable solutions in which communities are able to take true ownership – can’t truly be achieved with turnaround cycles that only allow for quick wins.

But Odeh is not alone in trying to create sustainable, bottom-up solutions in challenging environments. Seven other Labs across Africa and South Asia are constantly learning, sharing and updating ways of working across the translocal network. And such solutions are not confined to programmatic work, but have even influenced the way Friday leads his own team. 

“In our context the leader is always the leader. He leads and people follow, but I don’t want to be that kind of guy,” says Odeh.

“I was happy to learn from the flat structure, so I can help my management team think through their own ideas, and help guide rather than provide solutions”.

This way of leading not only released some of the pressure of centralized decision making but also gave senior staff at AL Nigeria the opportunity to lead processes and collaborate on solutions. Odeh credits the dynamic collective learning and implementation approach of the Lab with creating a way of working that allows for growth and change according to needs.

Read more about Accountability Lab Nigeria’s work over the past year in their annual report.

Samina Anwary