The World Bank’s Legitimacy Is Derived From Citizens, Now More Than Ever

This article was first published in the Global Policy Journal Back in 2017, the World Bank began an ambitious effort to improve the management of natural resources and tourism in southern Tanzania, while creating jobs and protecting the environment. While sounding like a fantastic way to support development in one of the poorest parts of the world - the Resilient Natural Resource Management for Tourism and Growth (REGROW) Project, as it was known - soon ran into difficulties. Villagers claimed they were forcibly evicted from their land, cattle were seized from pastoralists by national park rangers, and those who protested [...]

2025-09-24T15:55:16+00:0024th September 2025|

Creating a democracy worthy of Nepal’s GenZ

Nepal stands at a critical juncture. After years of frustration over kleptocracy, corruption and electoral manipulation, citizens and their new leaders have a sequence of key decisions to make.  With elections scheduled within the next few months, education on electoral processes and simplifying processes around voter cards are some of the priorities the country faces. This, in a country where young voters account for more than half of the electorate. Persistent shortcomings in the election system have already generated widespread discontent, creating conditions that could shake the legitimacy of the upcoming elections if these issues are not addressed comprehensively. Another [...]

2025-09-23T10:11:35+00:0023rd September 2025|

The Invisible Weaver’s Wisdom: Re-Stitching Philanthropy’s Approach for Enduring Resilience

All over the world, the civic infrastructure hasn’t collapsed completely. It’s being re-stitched together, not only by organizations and movements scrambling to adapt, but by people who have relational capital and are already adapting. Accountability Lab Senior Fellow Florencia Guerzovich calls them invisible weavers. Invisible weavers aren’t a new category on your grantee list. They’re the ones making your existing investments work better — and go further. They’re the ones connecting the dots when formal systems falter and when frameworks show cracks. They move between sectors, roles and vocabularies: donor to NGO, movement to ministry, global north to rural community. [...]

2025-09-12T12:55:17+00:0012th September 2025|

How co-leadership helps us navigate a sector-wide crisis

Accountability Lab's co-CEO Chief Innovation and Operations Officer, Jean Scrimgeour shared her first-learnings about how co-leadership helps position nonprofit organizations to better navigate today’s sector-wide challenges. In January, executive orders to freeze all U.S. international development aid upended an already resource-strapped sector. Overnight, organizations that had spent decades building programs and partnerships found themselves facing existential questions and extremely difficult leadership challenges. At Accountability Lab, we found our co-leadership model gave us an unexpected advantage. Eighteen months earlier, when Blair Glencorse, Cheri-Leigh Erasmus, and I decided to transition from a traditional CEO structure to shared leadership, we couldn’t have predicted how profoundly [...]

2025-09-12T08:56:57+00:0012th September 2025|

Launching a partnership matching service for nonprofits

While a lot of us have talked about the potential, value, and - in some cases - need for more mergers and acquisitions in the non-profit space, recent events have made it clear: now is the time. Immediately after recent US aid cuts, our team circulated a survey to civil society and international development organizations - and the resulting data, from more than 700 organizations, suggests that nearly 60% of organizations may close within the next 6 months. Given the recent stop work orders, contract and grant cancellations, and cascading effects of international civil society support shifts, a large number [...]

2025-04-10T11:45:20+00:0027th March 2025|

Journée Internationale de Lutte contre la Corruption

9 Décembre 2024 - A l’occasion de la journée internationale de lutte contre la corruption, célébrée chaque le 09 décembre, pour cette année 2024,  Accountability Lab RDC avec plus de 700 personnes issues des mouvements citoyens, des acteurs de la société civile, les jeunes entrepreneurs, les étudiants, des agents  de l’Etat et les associations des femmes engagées se sont unis pour une sensibilisation à grande échelle et hausser leurs voix pour dénoncer la corruption qui gangrène la gouvernance des institutions et des services publics et compromet gravement le développement de l’Est du pays et de la RDC en générale.  Sous le [...]

2024-12-10T21:26:56+00:0010th December 2024|

Building (unfunded) accountability into the localization agenda – Part 2

In the first blog of this series, we spoke about the challenges of being small and accountable. In this second instalment, we talk about the solutions that our community has found to overcome or partially address the challenges.   None of the accountability challenges mentioned in the first blog are new, or unique to Accountability Lab. Many organizations are valiantly taking up the “shifting the power” mantle while trying to keep the lights on. The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has recently increased the de minimus rate (the indirect cost rate applied to grants for those that do [...]

2024-09-30T19:34:51+00:0019th September 2024|

Building (unfunded) accountability into the localization agenda – Part 1

This is the first of a two-part series of blogs about accountability in the non-profit sector and how funders can better understand how this relates to localization. Being accountable is expensive. At Accountability Lab we have found that since we first wrote about this issue 5 years ago, that while people are becoming more aware of the costs of being accountable, it is more difficult, and  more expensive to fund than ever. The much-needed localization agenda has committed development partners (in particular the US Government) to directly channel a larger portion of official development assistance (ODA) to local partners in [...]

2024-09-30T19:33:45+00:0019th September 2024|

Conscious music and youth commitments in South Africa

Collaborative leadership has been at the heart of our work in South Africa. The Accountability Lab South Africa (ALSA) team has worked hard on improving service delivery challenges through Action4Accountability - a Civic Action Teams project - as well as launching the very first amapiano conscious music album. Interim Country Director Sadia Khan explains that they have relied on particular values like transparency, practicality and collaboration to make sure all the different parts of the work are supported. “It’s about being true to yourself and taking responsibility for your actions,” she says. This philosophy is also evident in ALSA’s diverse [...]

2024-08-15T12:49:30+00:0013th August 2024|

Funke Adeoye and her access to justice mission in Nigeria

Oluwafunke Adeoye, or Funke as everyone calls her, is a lawyer, human rights defender, social innovator, young global leader, and proud Accountapreneur. She is Hope Behind Bars Africa’s Founder and Executive Director. It's an organization that promotes human rights and criminal justice reforms using legal aid, research, evidence-based advocacy, and technology. Funke has led interventions that amplified the work of grassroots advocates across sub-Saharan Africa and saved hundreds of indigent pre-trial detainees. She is a Mandela Washington Fellow and an Acumen West Africa Fellow, winning the 2023 Global Citizen Prize last year. This year saw her also being admitted to [...]

2024-10-04T15:47:25+00:0011th August 2024|
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