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CARE's Accountability Framework
Overview
CARE is committed to accountable, just and sustainable development that benefits and upholds the rights of the most vulnerable and excluded communities around the world, especially women and girls. A core part of our work is promoting inclusive governance and processes for citizens to interact with and interrogate governments and institutions to strengthen their performance. We recognise that we too must be held to account in our role as an international civil society organisation. CARE defines accountability as explaining, being held responsible for and hearing the perspectives of others about how well we are meeting our commitments - and then actively making changes and improvements based on what we’ve learned and heard.
CARE adopted an organisation wide Accountability Framework in 2016 in recognition of the need to be more consistent and open as an organisation about how we are held accountable in all parts of our work. It places the rights of people from the most vulnerable and excluded communities, especially women and girls, are at the heart of our commitments. Our framework and supporting practices build on our extensive experience with humanitarian accountability and inclusive governance programming, and is informed by industry-wide standards and guidance that we have committed to, including the Core Humanitarian Standards (CHS) and Accountable Now/Global Standard for CSO Accountability.
Our Commitments
Impact:CARE and our partners’ contribution to bringing about sustainable change in the fight against poverty and injustice, specifically through our commitment to support 150 million people from the most vulnerable and excluded communities to overcome poverty and social injustice by 2020. We measure this through a set of 25 global outcome and change indicators.
Organisational Performance:CARE commits to being an efficient, effective and equitable organisation that makes best use of the resources entrusted to us to deliver on our impact. We assess the health of our network, our ways of working, the progress on our strategic directions and our future-oriented organisational development. We monitor performance standards and analyse key programmatic, financial, human resource, gender and good governance data. We also assess how well we are upholding our internal policies and meeting the external commitments we have publically signed on to.
Collaboration:CARE believes in the power of collaboration for greater impact, and is committed to strengthening how we partner and engage with others. We evaluate the relevance and strength of our collaborations – the wide range of actors and communities with whom we partner, those who fund our work, those who mobilise with us to influence change and the governments that host us – and how well we enable and unleash the potential of these collaborations.
CARE integrates our core accountability principles throughout and monitors how well we are enacting them:
Transparency– The opportunity to see and understand
Feedback– The opportunity to share input, concerns, suggestions for improvement and to get a response
Participation– The opportunity to be actively involved and help shape strategy and decision-making
Download CARE's Accountability Framework (English, French, Spanish, Arabic):
