Introduction

Dear colleagues and friends

This Fourth Edition of EXCHANGES focuses on accountability and transparency, two of ActionAid’s five core principles guiding all our work.

AAI has been recognised amongst civil society organisations and other INGOs as a leader in critical thinking and practice around accountability, ever since we adopted our Accountability, Learning, and Planning System (Alps), which clearly establishes participation of and accountability to poor and excluded rights holders as the foundation of all our systems. The 2006 annual study by the UK’s One World Trust, which ranks international NGOs, businesses, and multilaterals, gave ActionAid one of the highest scores because of our policies.

Our own reviews, however, show that we are far from implementing Alps fully. If we are to fulfil our own standards, and move our accountability knowledge, ideas and work forward into the next cycle of innovation and challenge, then it is absolutely essential that we continue to reflect, document, dialogue and innovate. This is a key aim of this edition of EXCHANGES.

The focus on accountability in this edition of EXCHANGES is also timeous. One of the areas agreed as a priority, in the annual plan for 2009, is to deepen accountability in the whole of ActionAid International, in individual countries and in the international secretariat. We hope these articles will help to spark thinking and exchange ideas to meet this objective, which we all share for this year.

We invite you to share with us any thoughts and questions you have as you read this edition of EXCHANGES and think about how to deepen accountabilities in your own work. We will be establishing some kind of platform on the intranet on accountability, and it would be very helpful to know your thoughts as we set out to shape this.

The edition has benefited from the wisdom and input of many, but we would like, in particular, to thank Sandeep Chachra and Nini Mehrotra of the Just and Democratic Governance Theme team for their contributions to thinking through and building some of the content of this newsletter. We thank the contributors who have persevered, under often difficult conditions, to write their pieces and endure the endless rounds of editing. This type of platform for shared learning and knowledge generation would not be possible without you. And thank you to Hamlet Johannes, of the IASL team, for his tireless, professional and ever good humoured support, to Alastair Findlay for the great illustrations, to Dr. Patricia Watson for her editing support, and finally to Barret Stewart from Blueshift Design for work on the design and layout of this first online version of Exchanges!

Laurie Adams, International Head of Impact Assessment and Shared Learning
Samantha Hargreaves, International Shared Learning Coordinator.