Project

Community and Health Provider-driven Social Accountability Intervention (CaPSAI)

Chapter: Ghana | Project range: National | Year: 2018

Chapter details

About the chapter:
Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) is the Ghanaian chapter of Transparency International (TI). Established in 1999, GII is a non-partisan, non-profit civil empowerment organisation focused on the delivery of a National Integrity System. GII’s mission is to fight corruption and promote good governance in the daily lives of citizens and institutions by forging strong, trusting and effective partnerships with the government, the private sector and civil society actors and through continuous engagement with the people of Ghana.

CPI Score: 41

CPI Rank: 78


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Summary

Access to medicines, vaccines and other products

Services

Partners

National Partners:
Ministry of Health NGO or Civil Society Organisation Population Council

Theory of Change

Policy & Insititutional Change
Better Institutional Processes
Behaviour Change
Community Action

Aim

The aim of the CaPSAI project is two-fold:
- Describe and examine how social accountability processes are implemented and operationalized with a focus on understanding behaviours, decision-making processes, and the barriers and enablers of change, with a view to generalizability;
- Develop more responsive quantitative measures for social accountability and show the relationship between social accountability and uptake of contraceptives and use of other family planning measures.

Landscape

The continuous burden of unmet need for family planning and contraceptives (FP/C) services and information remains a challenge. Often contraceptive services and supplies remain inaccessible for many women and girls as well as men and boys because they are either not available or not affordable. For women and girls who do have access to FP/C services, they can face informal fees, disrespectful staff, few choices offered, and may lack knowledge and information about contraception. The research project builds on and contributes to a growing, but limited set of work that aims to better understand how social accountability and participatory processes in the context of FP/C programmes/services contributes to achieving of sexual and reproductive health and improve the quality of care and contraceptive uptake in FP/C services.

Activities

  1. Sessions on health, rights and civic education were conducted in communities.
    Awareness raising
  2. Accountability issues were prioritised with community members and health providers.
    AdvocacyConsultation
  3. Interface meetings were held with community members and service providers alongside the development of action plans.
    Improvement plans
  4. Continuous follow-up of issues in the action plans.
    AdvocacyMonitoring & evaluation

Achievements

  1. Cost of family planning services has been standardised to eradicate illicit charges by health providers.
  2. Health goods have been regulated by the Department of Health.
  3. Community members are better informed and hence better equipped to hold healthcare duty bearers accountable.
  4. Dissatisfied clients or patients can reportproblems to health authorities authorities.
  5. Community Steering Committees have been instituted to liaise between communities and health facilities to ensure effective flow of information (e.g. on healthcare rights).