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A look at our Citizen Helpdesks model

This presentation prepared by Accountability Lab gives a deeper understanding of how our Citizen Helpdesk program works. Citizen Helpdesks are a pioneering citizen feedback, dialogue and community voice platform to ensure accountability in the development process. The Helpdesks collect critical information from hundreds of communities to solve daily problems for citizens and close the loop on challenges related to everything from service delivery, to human trafficking, to natural resource management and security issues. Citizens and communities are rarely consulted about the decisions that affect their lives, particularly in hard-to-reach places. Where information is collected from them, the process is extractive, [...]

2019-09-13T00:00:00+00:0013th September 2019|

How to create a positive feedback loop between citizens and government? It’s not easy.

By Alisa Zomer The original blog post can be found on MIT/GOVLAB's website. We took a look at Accountability Lab’s Citizen Helpdesks in Nepal to understand how the project is working on the ground. A returned migrant worker stands up to speak at a community meeting in the ward chairman’s office. It takes him a minute to find his voice —his experience working abroad was bad, but talking about it is another form of hardship. Social stigma often silences overseas workers from Nepal, who are ashamed to admit what they went through, and how they were tricked into unsafe, sometimes [...]

2018-11-08T00:00:00+00:008th November 2018|

Nepal’s earthquake disaster: Two years and $4.1bn later

By: Narayan Adhikari. This article was originally published by Al Jazeera. Despite the billions pledged, the majority of Nepalis affected by the earthquake still don't have proper housing. The Nepalese government demolished the only earthquake shelter in Kathmandu, where hundreds sought temporary sanctuary after the 2015 earthquake [EPA/Narendra Shrestha]   On April 25, 2015, a powerful earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people and destroyed more than 824,000 homes in Nepal. Shortly after, the country's Reconstruction Authority published a vision for "well-planned resilient settlements and a prosperous society". But it is clearly falling short of that goal because of poor coordination between government [...]

2017-04-25T00:00:00+00:0025th April 2017|

Two Years Since the Nepal Earthquakes & A Chance to Maximize Your Impact

Two years ago the first of several devastating earthquakes hit Nepal, killing over 9,000 people and destroying almost a million homes. Today, exactly 2 years later, barely 5% of the destroyed houses have been rebuilt. Hundreds of thousands of people still struggle to get by in temporary housing, many without clean water or any public services. Since the day after the first earthquake, we've been running Citizen Helpdesks in the worst affected areas, deploying hundreds of community volunteers to monitor and improve the earthquake response and close the loop on accountability problems. And it's working. To date we've reached over 70,000 people in [...]

2017-04-25T00:00:00+00:0025th April 2017|

Ignore Feedback Loops at Your Peril Evidence from Nepal

By: Narayan Adhikari, who runs the Accountability Lab in Nepal, and Pranav Budhathoki, Executive Director of Local Interventions Group. This blog post was originally published by Feedback Labs. In February 2016, almost a year after Nepal’s first devastating earthquake, government officials and 344 earthquake-affected Nepalis squatted on the grounds of a public school in the epicenter district of Gorkha. This was a community meeting organized by Accountability Lab and Local Interventions Group. The group collectively set out to solve a serious problem– there was not enough assistance to survive. The government showed no sense of urgency to speed up aid delivery. Citizens demanded [...]

2016-10-19T00:00:00+00:0019th October 2016|
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