Citizens play a crucial role in helping and advocating to make people more transparent, effective and accountable, and contributing innovative answers to complex development challenges.
Growing evidence verifies that under ideal conditions, citizens and community engagement helps authorities achieve improved growth and leads to generating links between citizen engagement and enhanced public service delivery, public financial management, and empowerment.
Image Source: Google
Successful engagement can be influenced by social, political, economic, ecological, cultural, geographical, and other factors, such as gender dynamics.
Engaging citizens is particularly important during times of disaster such as the COVID-19 pandemic, since the efficacy of response efforts may often hinge on behavior change in the micro-level.
Engaging citizens and mobilizing communities in the process can help bring increased transparency, responsibility, and social inclusion, consequently improving development success.
The Strategic Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement in WBG Operations was designed in 2014 to systematically mainstream citizen involvement in WBG-supported operations.
The Strategic Framework defines citizen participation as the two-way interaction between governments and citizens or the private industry over the reach of WBG interventions. This strategy provides citizens a bet in decision-making so as to enhance intermediate and final improvement results.
The strategy to mainstream citizen engagement is guided by principles:
-It's results-focused
-Entails engaging during the operational cycle
-Attempts to strengthen country systems