How do you “do” systems change?

By Jean Scrimgeour & Cheri-Leigh Erasmus The Accountability Lab supports responsible leaders, active citizens and accountable institutions. We think this can make governance work for people. For us, this is essential if we want to live in a world where resources are used wisely, decisions benefit everyone fairly, and people lead secure lives. We know that systems change is complicated, time consuming and unlikely to produce neat, sequential outcomes. But we also understand that in order to bring about these changes we will need to be a part of a fundamental shift in the underlying structures and systems.  We have [...]

2021-01-13T16:15:44+00:0013th January 2021|

Five Ideas We Heard from 1,000+ Young Open Government Reformers

By Katie Fuhs and Blair Glencorse   Governance cannot be open unless it is open for everyone. This means it needs to include women, indigenous groups, members of the LGBTQIA+ community and many others. Youth cross-cuts all of these groups, and young people are even playing a critical role in pushing for a more transparent, fair and equitable response and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Young people have always been willing to challenge the status-quo but have historically had difficulty ensuring that their voices and ideas are included in policymaking  processes. But with massive demographic shifts around the world, enhanced [...]

2020-12-07T19:49:32+00:004th December 2020|

Growing from failure at the workplace

By Bakhtawar Khalid Fail faire events are designed to celebrate the lessons we learn from the failures we face in different walks of life. For this edition of the series, Accountability Lab Pakistan (ALP) brought together a cross-section of professionals to reflect on the failures they have experienced at the workplace. We share the lessons we derive from these experiences in the hope that it will encourage others to reflect on their own failures and extract meaningful insight on how to grow and improve. All our speakers were mid-career level professionals who are themselves figuring out their journey to success. [...]

2022-11-10T06:46:26+00:0022nd September 2020|

The Value of Translocal Networks

Written by Director for Growth and Operations, Jean Scrimgeour   The Accountability Lab (AL) started to demonstrate how governance can work for people by supporting creative solutions for accountability. Nine years later, the Lab has developed into a network of 9 country teams, 5 additional country partners and almost 110 team members. But AL is not, nor was it ever intended to be, an international non-government organisation (INGO).   Instead, we see ourselves as a translocal network, a collective of local organisations that have a shared purpose and understanding about the challenges we face and what we believe are the creative [...]

2024-03-12T07:40:19+00:0011th August 2020|

Celebrating Student Life and Recognizing Failure as Part of Learning

Admitting failure is often seen as a sign of weakness or of accepting defeat, which is why there is so much social stigma around it. At Accountability Lab, we want to change norms and perceptions around the notion of failure. We do this by providing people with a platform to speak honestly and openly about their failures while also sharing the learnings from their stories and recounting how they were able to overcome these failures.  This enables other participants to recognize their own patterns of dealing with failure, counters the stigma around failure and helps relieve some of the anxiety [...]

2022-11-10T06:46:26+00:0011th August 2020|

Celebrating Successful Women; Leveraging Failure for Success

“A key component of wisdom is fearlessness … which is not the absence of fear, but rather not letting our fears get in the way…. So very often the difference between success and failure is perseverance. It’s how long can we keep going until success happens? It’s getting up one more time than we fall down.”  - Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post  Recognizing failure is an essential part of our learning journey. We conduct Fail Faire events as a celebration of fail stories and how we can learn from them. In March, our Fail Faire focused on [...]

2020-07-07T19:14:20+00:0019th May 2020|

Countering coronavirus – here’s what we’re up to at the Lab

Like every other organization globally, we’re working hard to adapt in the face of the unprecedented public health and economic crisis we now face. Of course, our plans for the next 2-3 months, and possibly longer, have now been transformed dramatically- and we are working with our teams to find the right ways forward. Here’s what we’ve done operationally: Guidance- provided detailed guidance to all staff on ways forward during the pandemic including advice on adapting policies, regulating behaviors, providing emotional support and re-thinking approaches and programs. We have also shared this guidance in a variety of fora online, and [...]

2020-03-25T00:00:00+00:0025th March 2020|

Communautés de pratique au Niger

Dans le cadre des activités Lien et Apprentissage du programme Voice au Niger, s’est tenu le 29 janvier 2020 au complexe le MAFE, l’atelier de création des communautés de pratique entre les organisations partenaires de Voice au Niger et d’autres locales ayant les mêmes thématiques d’impact que Voice. Par Adamou Oumarou L’atelier de création de communautés de pratique est une activité du lien et apprentissage, l’objectif est d’organiser les organisations locales en réseau pour discuter, échanger, apprendre et trouver ensemble des solutions face aux problèmes ou défis qu’ils rencontrent dans leurs activités quotidiennes. Cet atelier a commencé par un exercice [...]

2020-02-17T00:00:00+00:0017th February 2020|

We Have a New Strategy; Here’s Where We Fell Short on the Last One

You may have read the first in our three-part series of strategy blogs yesterday in which we highlighted the key areas of our new 2020-2023 strategy, including the focus on growing our campaigns, building knowledge and bringing together communities. We explained that these three elements of our work - as outlined in our Theory of Action - now provide what we feel is a mutually reinforcing approach to supporting active citizens, responsible leaders and accountable institutions. Our new strategy emerged from a collective process of introspection and reflection around what we tried to do previously, where we came up short [...]

2020-01-29T00:00:00+00:0029th January 2020|

Our New Strategy as a Process Not an Output

This is the third in our series of blogs on our new strategy. Read the first on where we’re headed in the new strategy here; and the second on what we did not achieve in our last strategy and what that means for us going forwards here. By Blair Glencorse. The content of a strategy is important, and a nice shiny new strategy document is potentially a useful output, but not if it is only going to gather dust on a bookshelf or be used as a doorstop. Through our process we have become even more convinced that a strategy [...]

2020-01-29T00:00:00+00:0029th January 2020|
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