Policy Brief and Roundtable Discussion on Image and Credibility of CSOs in Public
Summary Report
Afghanistan Institute for Civil Society (AICS) launched the policy brief “Image and Credibility of CSOs in Public” on 8th July 2018 at the AICS office with 19 participants (5 female and 14 male). This event started with the opening speech of Director of Policy and Engagement and followed by a comprehensive presentation on findings of the policy brief. He stated that according to SEECA 2017, only CSOs involved in service delivery activities that provide tangible benefits to communities possess good public support and CSOs involved in advocacies and rights-based campaigns lack the support. This could be due to “government-owned” CSOs, donor-oriented objectives, dependency on external funding and the associated competition.
Furthermore, media thprofit-orientedital role in promoting CSOs image in public often do not have the tendency to support CSOs without huge amount of financial interest which is due to their profit oriented vision. People in suburb areas of the country have no information about CSOs and their functionality. Subsequently, more of the key findings of policy brief were presented by him and during the session he addressed participants’ questions and comments. Following the presentation, participants started an open discussion regarding the key findings of the brief. Participants raised their concerns regarding low public support to CSOs that has restraints opportunities of indigenous funding. Participants stated that due to project oriented functionality of NGOs, people’s real necessities are under looked and this causes people’s trust to minimize and in some cases totally blur.
Corruption which domineers both government and CSOs systems is another cause of CSOs disrepute; corruption has hindered transparent and efficient service delivery to the public. From the other hand, since CSOs do not have any public reporting mechanism through which they could account to the public of their projects and spending, people have the strong assumption that CSO are just some western supported agencies that waste money on unnecessary projects that do not reflects people’s real needs.
Corruption which domineers both government and CSOs systems is another cause of CSOs disrepute; corruption has hindered transparent and efficient service delivery to the public. From the other hand, since CSOs do not have any public reporting mechanism through which they could account to the public of their projects and spending, people have the strong assumption that CSO are just some western supported agencies that waste money on unnecessary projects that do not reflects people’s real needs.
In order to address the current and future challenges that CSOs face in terms of their credibility in public, growing monolithic civil society is prerequisite. Their strong tie with government, media and private sector can ensure efficiency and transparency and eventually more public support. Participants reiterated that CSOs should focus on funding diversification and communicate with the donor community to ensure they are more involved in assessing people’s real needs and designing projects. They also demanded more technical support in terms of CSOs capacity building and developing country wide and up to date databases where people find more about CSOs and their work.
At the end participants insisted on formation of certain follow up mechanisms so that recommendations of this paper get to a practical stage.
