Regional Learning

The PSAM’s Regional Learning Programme (RLP) offers the Fundamentals of Social Accountability Monitoring (FSAM) course on various occasions each year. The 36th installment of this university-accredited course is scheduled to take place from 14 to 25 October 2024 at Rhodes University in Makhanda/Grahamstown, South Africa.

PSAM has been offering the course since 2007 with close to 700 participants from civil society organizations, parliaments, media, academia, and governments having been trained to date. The course seeks to enable participants to understand and apply the principles of a rights-based approach to social accountability monitoring and to identify the legislative frameworks that oversee social accountability monitoring in their contexts.

Participants, who complete this course, should be able to:

Understand and apply the principles of a rights-based approach to social accountability monitoring.
Evaluate the relevance of social accountability monitoring to participants’ organization and country-specific contexts.
Track expenditure against budget allocations to service providers/agencies.
Monitor the performance of service providers/agencies against their strategic plans and service delivery commitments.
Evaluate the accountability of service providers/agencies and the executive to oversight bodies.
Identify social accountability advocacy opportunities within the public resource management framework and apply basic advocacy skills.

Kindly complete this expression of interest form by 9 August 2024 if you are interested in attending the course.

Contact details: Mr. Luyanda Shilangu; psam.training@ru.ac.za, l.shilangu@ru.ac.za; +27 46 603 8883; +27 82 647 9138 (WhatsApp)

The RLP also engages in partnerships with organisations falling within its target group to test the applicability of its approach to social accountability monitoring in a number of contexts within Sub-Saharan Africa. The nature of these partnerships is context-specific and the terms are negotiated and agreed between the RLP and its partners. Previous and current partnerships have included the following activities:

Mapping out the legislative, procedural and normative framework for public resource management within the relevant country context;
Adaptations of the PSAM Fundamentals of Social Accountability Monitoring course to various country contexts, through the use of a local government authority as a case study;
Training of local trainers to deliver context-specific adaptations of the PSAM course;
Providing technical and mentoring support to local trainers;
Mentoring of partners and their trainees on the application of the PSAM tools and systematic approach to social accountability monitoring over a 3-year period;
Assisting with the documentation of monitoring outcomes, impact and lessons for sharing with a wider audience;
Facilitating linkages and networking with other social accountability stakeholders

Having run the Fundamentals of Social Accountability (FSAM) course 34 times since 2007, the PSAM has brought to life a Social Accountability Network and community of over 600 past participants. The PSAM therefore encourages all its Fundamentals course alumni to join the Fundamentals Alumni Group that can be accessed through the COPSAM website. The platform seeks to enable practitioners in the region to come together virtually, interact and share SAM practice experiences and how to better adapt these practices in order to meet our individual and collective objectives.

Click on the link below to find out more:

Fundamentals of Social Accountability Monitoring Course

This certificate course seeks to enable participants to understand and apply the principles of a rights-based approach to social accountability monitoring, and identify the legislative framework that oversees social accountability monitoring in their contexts. It seeks to enable them to evaluate the relevance of social accountability monitoring to their organisations and country-specific contexts.It also aims to enable participants to identify social accountability advocacy opportunities within the public resource management framework and apply various advocacy skills. &nbsp Read More

The course has been accredited with Rhodes University. Accreditation with the University makes accreditation with SAQA (South African Qualifications Authority) automatic as the former is recognized by SAQA and the Department of Education as a registered provider of higher education and has been delegated authority by the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) to accredit its own short courses.
SAQA uses a National Qualifications Framework (NQF) to give academic weighting to qualifications. Our course is currently graded at NQF Level 6, which is Diploma/Advanced certificate level. For information on how to apply and costs, contact us at psam.training@ru.ac.za/ l.shilangu@ru.ac.za.

Regional Partnerships

The PSA Alliance is a consortium of organisations led by ActionAid International and includes the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM), the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers Forum (ESAFF) and SAfAIDS, which is implementing the project ‘Strengthening Social Accountability and Oversight in Health and Agriculture in Southern Africa’, with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Through this project, the PSA Alliance works to improve social accountability and gender-responsiveness in public resource management in health and agricultural services across various countries, contributing to the realisation of SADC commitments on HIV, sexual and reproductive rights (SRHR) and food security in the Southern African region.

To consider the project’s highlights for the period September 2020 to September 2021 please see our Annual Newsletter.

The PSA Alliance conducted social accountability monitoring, using standardised community scorecards and district-level questionnaires, across selected districts in the five project countries (Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe) between Sept 2020 and March 2021. The findings reveal regional trends in how community members rate the delivery of their local health services – particularly, sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services for young people and adolescents. The results and recommendations provide critical insights to inform the rollout and monitoring of the SADC SRHR Strategy and Scorecard 2019-2030.

Generally, the findings show that while SRH services are available in the districts covered, many barriers to young people’s access exist, including lack of youth-friendly services, inadequate staffing, inconvenient operating hours, long travel distances, low availability of educational information and an incomplete range of SRH commodities. The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in further deterioration in the access to services. As a result of low participation of young people in government planning and budgeting processes, including their reluctance to report on poor services, and lack of responsiveness by service providers to complaints, these challenges are allowed to persist.

For more details, including recommendations to national and district-level governments, read the community scorecards and district questionnaire summary reports.

Community scorecard summary report – http://copsam.com/…/2017/02/PSA-CSC-Summary-2021.pdf

District questionnaire summary report – http://copsam.com/…/2017/02/PSA-DLQ-Summary-2021.pdf