Extending Budget Support to Civil Society - Part 2: An Example from Ecuador

In the second part of a series on how Sector Budget Support can extend to Civil Society and what can be achieved,  Dominique Wauters, Head of Cooperation in the regionalised EU Delegation of Quito, Ecuador, shares his experience of engaging with civil society to build partnerships for service delivery and encourage more inclusive policy dialogue.

Head of Cooperation section in the regionalised EU Delegation to Ecuador is Dominique Wauters. Here, civil society is viewed by government as an important player.

“Ecuador had a new constitution in 2008, and this is quite progressive. They introduced a lot of new concepts; for example, civil society is considered as the fifth power.In the constitution they are considered as an active actor in socio- economic life.

“In Ecuador we have bilateral cooperation focused on two sectors: Education and Sustainable and Inclusive Economy.The implementation modality that we use is 94% using Budget Support.We have accompanying measures in the question of visibility, technical assistance and something that is quite particular is the monitoring of the policy of the government in implementation by the civil society.

“In supporting the ten-year Education Plan, 2006 – 2015, we support basic education, in particular coverage - access to education and quality of education.We made a call for proposals to select a group of NGOs to develop a system of monitoring of the ten-year plan by the civil society.After selecting a group of NGOs in agreement with the Ministry of Education, they managed first to give a better access to the population, and to statistics and data used by the Ministry of Education.For example – a director of a school in a small village can now know the number of teachers he has in comparison to other regions.Associations of parents or teachers can have access to the information also.

“You can allow everybody - the state and CS- to have a better indicators and precise data on the progress and it helps the government with decisions how to reorient or strengthen the policy and for CS to dialogue with the government about these results." (The website, http://www.educiudadania.org, was developed as a platform for transparency).

Educiudadanía is a citizens' network that accompanies the ten-year Education Plan (EDP) by supporting universal education coverage and accompanied by concrete mechanisms of transparency, accountability and spaces open for citizens. It promotes the local approach aimed at building an active citizenship committed to the development of its community. One of its components is based on capacity development. Indeed, the programme intends to strengthen capacities from both civil society and the public sector on areas of information management and formulation of education policies. 

“You can consider that the context was quite good, but it doesn’t mean that it was easy or was not a lot of work, because in Ecuador there is something of ‘ownership’.Also we had to demonstrate that Policy Dialogue has mutual benefit.It was not easy to explain to the administration how Budget Support works and why it was of interest, because one of the decisions included in the new constitution was that in a few years the government had to duplicate the budget of the educational inputs of the government.

“In fact the real benefit that resulted was mutual confidence.It was through Policy Dialogue that really they understood that by working together we can help to improve the mechanism in question of quality of indicators and exchange of involvement of all the stakeholders.

“In any project, even in a very poor situation, I think what is important is that there is existing a dynamic in the system. The contribution of the EU is to allow the dynamic and result of an outcome to be quicker, better quality, maybe better focused but we cannot replace the political will, the internal power and internal trends.

“There are many countries in the world where maybe this experience can be useful and we are always ready to share this experience with more details."

More information can be found in Case 7 of the "Engaging Non-State Actors in New Aid Modalities" reference document.

This collaborative piece was drafted with input from Dominique Wauters , Tony Land and Simon Vanden Broeke with support from the capacity4dev.eu Coordination Team.