Call to use assessment tool 'Community Score Card'

Community Score Card (CSC), a tool that enables citizens to assess the quality of public services, can be an effective means to ensure people's participation in government activities and help establish good governance in the country, speakers said at a meeting yesterday.
Manusher Jonno Foundation (MJF) has introduced the tool in different areas across the country for monitoring social safety-net and primary education and found it as a necessary tool for social mobilisation to ensure social accountability.
“Teachers in many areas are enjoying unauthorised leave, engaged in irregularities, and choosing their workstation by offering bribes to higher authorities, as the government monitoring is very poor”, MJF Executive Director Shaheen Anam told the meeting. “We have launched the Community Score Card of citizen monitoring as an alternative to government monitoring”, she added.
Titled "Social Accountability in Primary Education and Social Safety-net Services", the meeting was organised by MJF at the capital's Brac Centre Inn.
Speaking as chief guest, Hossain Zillur Rahman, former adviser to a caretaker government, stressed the practice of social accountability at root level to ensure good governance.
Social accountability enables a collective social power to solve problem at root levels, he said.
"We might be able to solve 50 percent of the root level problems if we are in a practice of promoting social accountability, and we don't have to long for government's help to solve every problem”.
Ashraf Hossain, director general of Directorate of Women Affairs; Golam Mostafa, chairman of Kumira Union Parishad, Satkhira, and Naimur Rahman, chief operating officer of Affiliated Network for Social Accountability South Asia Region (ANSA-SA), also spoke among others.
ANSA-SA provides financial and technical assistance for the CSC project.