This is not to say that NEI did not succeed in achieving the social accountability aim of citizen empowerment. It did, to some extent. NEI trained a lot of citizens, taught them how to advocate, and created civil society structures in which citizens could examine information, deliberate over needs, prioritize needs, develop plans, and inject those needs and plans into the decision making machinery of Nigeria. But was this truly empowerment? A well-informed seat at the MTSS table must be closely tethered to real and substantial political-economic power if the voice at that informed seat is to be heard. So too, the wants, needs, and demands of the people who want improved education service delivery must be closely tethered to substantive political-economic power, else those voices will not be heard.
In many countries, the voices of teachers’ unions are heard because they have significant political-economic power. They can represent hundreds of thousands of potential voters, who can go out on strike if need be. Moreover, teachers’ union actors are adept at playing the political-economic game and they have the financial resources to play it well. Civil society organizations, parents of school-age children, and ordinary citizens who want improved education service delivery struggle to generate the same amount of leverage, which proved to be a challenge to sustaining social accountability efforts in the NEI case. When a donor-supported social accountability effort comes to an end without having generated concrete results (or without an institutional actor supported by a financing mechanism to expand upon nascent changes over time), citizens become dispirited, donor-initiated structures may morph into fundraising organizations, and the status quo prevails.
It is clear that donor-supported social accountability projects wield some political-economic force; witness all that was accomplished under NEI. But also witness what was not accomplished: government service delivery was not much improved. If citizen empowerment is a fundamental aim of social accountability, it must come wrapped in more than training and fleeting structures. To persist, these structures must connect to mechanisms of
genuine, sizable, and sustainable political-economic power in the arenas within which demands for improved government service delivery are being made.
Social Accountability in Education 45
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