Hope and Homes for Children KTP: Building Accountability to Young People in Youth Focussed Development

Value

£300K

Partners and collaborators

Hope and Homes for Children

Description

The project takes as its starting point tensions in understandings of 'accountability' within the aid sector. Literature highlights how the aid sector is forced to balance tensions between Upward Accountability (UA) and Downward Accountability (DA). UA, directed towards Donors, is generally defined as 'functional' or 'direct' accountability. Conversely, DA is directed towards beneficiaries and often seen as strategic/implicit. 'Compared with donors, beneficiaries are dependent stakeholders lacking the power to hold NGOs accountable, but they are the ultimate reason for NGOs' existence and legitimacy (Assad and Goddard, 2010 Wellens and Jegers, 2014).

While being accountable to beneficiaries is typically a normative expectation of charities, rather than a requirement from donors, poor downward accountability (through ineffective projects that do not deliver useful outcomes to 'beneficiaries') can impact on a charity's effectiveness and, ultimately, reputation.

There have been attempts to create better frameworks for DA (e.g. ActionAid ALPS, the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership's Standard). However, these have tended to get stuck in the phase of diagnosing problems, rather than effecting change. Our challenge will be in avoiding this same scenario, and instead ensuring we create sustainable solutions that negotiate the competing power dynamics at work in development projects and embed radical youth accountability into Hope and Homes for Children's core work and mission.

Impact

The aim of our project is to co-develop with children and young people a definition and system of child-focussed accountability that forces organisations to see children and young people as equal partners in the development and delivery of the services designed to support them, to embed this system across HHC and then to develop a toolkit that can be taken up by other organisations in order to effect systemic change at scale.

In the process we will also:

• Help HHC increase its funding base
• Grow and upskill its workforce.

Support other organisations to address this issue through the creation of a dedicated Radical Accountability Unit within the organisation to help share best practice.