When Accountability Lab started more than 11 years ago, the need to cultivate and equip reformers pushing for social accountability in their communities and countries formed part of the organization’s DNA. This quickly led to the creation of the Accountability Incubator, which has provided training and support to over 300 young change-makers across 12 countries over the past decade. Having incubated various accountability-related projects, we’ve gained a lot of insight into the needs of the innovators in our incubators, and we have used those learnings to create Civic Charge: An Accelerator for Social Accountability Change Agents. Applications are open here until November 24, 2023.

What is Civic Charge?

Civic Charge is a year-long catalytic journey for change makers who are implementing innovative approaches to strengthen social accountability in Bangladesh, Belize, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Mali, Mexico, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somaliland, South Africa, Zimbabwe.

It targets individuals (or leaders within an organization) working on inclusion, climate justice, digital governance, or expanding civic agency. Consisting of monthly virtual learning and peer engagement sessions, Civic Charge is designed to provide practical support to catalyze the scale and impact of existing programs. The stackable curriculum will support innovators to work on critical areas like institutional strengthening, advanced project management, and communications and strategic engagement, amongst other themes. The program is a perfect fit for curious problem-solvers who want to be part of a global learning network. 

Based on our experience with the Accountability Incubator, we now know that:

1. Innovators need different levels of support at different times. Civic Charge provides the scaffolding to move projects and organizations forward strategically. While this isn’t profound, years of working on the incubator helped us identify the specific needs that surfaced after graduation from our program. The incubator supports initiatives that are somewhat more nascent – taking them from an idea to a project. Civic Charge is a response to the need for the tools to scale projects, collaborate effectively with others, raise resources, and future-proof their work. We believe this contributes to building more solid foundations for organizations in the civil society space.
2. There are many creative solutions at the local level, and they should be shared globally. Civic Charge will convene a global cohort of change-makers to learn together at similar stages of their work. While our incubator program is grounded in and builds networks in individual countries that form part of our translocal network, those who are further along in their work need a bigger platform to amplify and scale inventive, locally-led projects at the global level.
3. Supporting projects to get to the next level is a resource-intensive endeavor. Through small cohorts of 12 individuals in Civic Charge per year, we are investing in creating an integrated learning experience for change makers ready to engage globally. In our training programs, we strive to create tailored experiences that speak to the experiences and needs of participants. While the Accountability Incubator can do this at the country level with approximately 10 participants per year, we have not been able to duplicate the hands-on networking-building at the global level. We connect individuals working on similar challenges to each other across the network, but this has not been as structured or at the scale we’d want it to be to lead to meaningful outcomes, as it requires significant investments of time. Civic Charge takes this to the next level. 

2024 will be our pilot year for Civic Charge, and as always, we are committed to learning along the way and finding the most impactful way to spend resources. We invite you to share this opportunity with eligible innovators and to follow along as we identify our first Civic Charge cohort. 

Cheri-Leigh Erasmus