Archive for 2026
Extractives, revenue and community priorities in Mali
Gold has deep historical and economic significance in Mali. “It is part of Mali’s DNA and Mali’s history,” says Habibou Diaou, Country Director of Accountability Lab Mali. He points to the 14th-century ruler of the Mali Empire, whose wealth was closely tied to its gold and salt resources: “We talk about the richest man that has ever lived – Mansa Musa. He was from this part of the world.”
Today, the country’s relationship with gold raises many pressing governance questions: who benefits from extraction, how are its environmental impacts managed, and what say do communities have in decisions affecting their lives? We’re finding that stronger accountability begins with helping people access and interpret the information they need to engage with these questions.
Read MoreReimagining Microgrants: Bridging the Local Civic Infrastructure in Nepal
With funding spaces shrinking, and a large number of civil society organizations (CSOs) struggling to survive, microgrants or innovative grants are becoming critical to sustain the civic space, especially at the local level. AL Nepal’s microgrants are small-scale grants provided for a short implementation period, typically up to three months, with budgets generally ranging from…
Read MoreBuilding Resilience through Transitions: A New Model for Democracy Support
This piece was first published as part of the Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice’s volume Plural Futures for Democracy: Reflections from the Plural Futures for Democracy Workshop, Washington DC, November 2025 The global aid cuts that began in 2025 have exposed deep structural weaknesses in democracy support systems that were never designed for…
Read MoreBeyond “youth inclusion”: Lessons from Nepal’s Gen Z organisers
Since 2022, Gen Z movements have been at the forefront of protests across the world. Young people have taken their grievances with corruption and elite privilege, public service failure, economic insecurity, and repression to the streets, and in a short four years, five heads of state were toppled, and the definition of what constitutes civic…
Read MoreQ&A: Do you want to make a grant, or do you want to solve a problem?
This conversation is drawn from the AccountabiliTea Podcast, hosted by Accountability Lab Co-CEO Cheri-Leigh Erasmus who spoke with Carolyn Dallmann of Humanity United and Lior Ipp, CEO of Proximate Futures Fund, about participatory grantmaking, proximate leadership, and what it truly means to shift power in philanthropy. What have you learned from involving proximate actors directly…
Read MoreBuilding Civic Resilience: From Insight to Action
At this year’s UNGA, Accountability Lab, Ban Ki-moon Foundation, Civic Strength Partners, and UNDP convened leaders from civil society, philanthropy, and multilateral and development organizations. We met to shift the conversation about civil society’s future from diagnosis to actionable steps that strengthen the ecosystems we work in and proactively build resilient civic infrastructure. We asked…
Read MoreLooking Inward: Evaluation for Questions That Matter in Civil Society
Why do we conduct evaluations in civil society: to learn, to make decisions, to be accountable, or to justify what we’ve already done? The obvious answer is usually “for all of those reasons.” But in practice, these functions don’t always coexist well. Sometimes monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems produce information, reports, and evidence, but they…
Read MoreShifting power: Innovative approaches to grantmaking (Transcript)
What happens when funders hand decision-making power to the people closest to the challenges they are trying to address? In this episode of the AccountabiliTea Podcast, Accountability Lab Co-CEO Cheri-Leigh Erasmus speaks with Carolyn Dallmann of Humanity United and Lior Ipp, CEO of Proximate Futures Fund, about participatory grantmaking, proximate leadership, and what it truly…
Read MoreAccountability Lab’s New Strategic Directions
Here at the Lab we just wrapped a year-long process of reimagining what the network does next, and the result is our Strategic Directions for 2026 to 2028 paper. It’s less of a five-year plan (after all, these days it is hard to plan 5 weeks in advance, let alone half a decade!); and more…
Read MoreBuilding tools that last: Lessons in sustainability from HackCorruption
As HackCorruption comes to a close and the funding ecosystem in civic tech becomes increasingly uncertain amid shifting perceptions among global funding institutions, adaptability and tapping into diverse sustainability approaches matter more than ever. Throughout this project, we have observed that the risks of not planning for sustainability compound over the life of a tool.…
Read MoreBuilding Civil Society Wayfinder to Close the Proximity Gap
This article is one of three reflecting on Civil Society Wayfinder’s first months. It gives a comprehensive overview with valuable insights from organizations featured as part of the campaign. For more a more in depth look into the adaptive and collaborative heart of Wayfinder read Yamone Aye’s What Community Connections Taught Me. For a the…
Read MoreWhat Community Connections Taught Me: Reflections on Mapping Civil Society Across the Global South
In 2025, the global democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) sector ran into a wall of profound uncertainty. Large funding cuts and policy shifts by the United States government disrupted long-standing support systems for NGOs worldwide. The effects were immediate: local organizations lost critical funding, ongoing programs and staff were paused or dropped, and the…
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