Social accountability tools are a way of making the relationships between local governments and communities are transparent, thereby strengthening the responsiveness of the lowest tier of government and service providers and deepening democracy. CARE’s projects employ a range of these tools, allowing extremely poor women and men to provide feedback to their local government representatives and service providers on the quality of the services available. Community Score Cards rate, Social Audits, Citizens’ Charters; and Self-Evaluations allow service providers to honestly assess their own efficacy.

By introducing these tools, CARE deepens democracy and strengthens the responsiveness of the lowest tier of government and service providers by building systems of transparency and accountability. The tools create participatory spaces for the poor and marginalized to constructively engage with service providers in order to enhance the quality of basic services essential for them to graduate out of poverty. Changes in supply and demand structures. It also means we can promote lasting change, by creating an enabling, sustainable environment in which our other interventions can flourish.

While poor and marginalized people are dependent on markets to sell their products, provide supply services, sell their labor or consume products and services, they are often excluded from these value chains and unable to participate in or utilize market opportunities for their advantage. We facilitate the engagement of extremely poor people in markets, working with marginalized communities and powerful international corporations alike to promote mutually beneficial, pro-poor solutions to market challenges

Our interventions offer new opportunities for the private sector, connecting retailers to ‘base of the pyramid’ suppliers and building their capacity to reach remote consumer markets. In turn, our engagement makes gains for the very poor in a wide range of areas. We promote dignified livelihoods in the ready-made garments sector, and improve productivity, growth and incomes in the agricultural sector. Our interventions also stimulate inclusion and improved services for the extremely poor, including sexual and reproductive health care, and financial services such as banking, savings and mobile transactions. We also build innovative social enterprises, supporting local entrepreneurs to provide essential products and services to underserved communities which generating their own incomes. This private sector engagement has an effect on all our other development projects and work. It gives us the power to multiply the impact of our programs, through systemic, positive changes in supply and demand structures. It also means we can promote lasting change, by creating an enabling, sustainable environment in which our other interventions can flourish

CARE enables communities to come together to assess the local causes of poverty and social exclusion, and help them to develop their own goals and tackle them with collective action. We call this Community-Led Total Development.

This process often begins with a focus on sanitation goals, as communities work towards achieving ‘open-defecation-free’ status. Through the development and implementation of a Community Action Plan, the community builds solidarity, dignity, trust, and recognizes their capacity to create meaningful change together. This success encourages further collective action, focused on goals such as eradicating exploitative money lending, abolishing hunger, or ensuring that all children are able to attend school.

Inclusion is crucial to Community-Led Total Development, it engages social elites and marginalized groups alike, including women and men from all socioeconomic, ethnic and religious backgrounds. This leads to a stronger sense of agency among the poor, as well as improved relations between social groups, and ultimately triggers a structural transformation in the local community.

Solidarity groups are the structures that enable grass-roots community action. CARE brings marginalized and poor people together to learn, identify and prioritize their needs, and develop collective plans for action, which they use to tackle the problems that they face. Working in small, local collectives means that each group has the flexibility and potential for innovation that they need to make change in their own unique environment.

We use this approach in a wide range of contexts. In both rural and urban communities, women form Empowerment, Knowledge and Transformative Action (EKATA) groups, and use them to tackle inequalities such as violence against women and child marriage, and develop new ways to generate income. Community-based savings and microfinance groups allow women and men to build sustainable, member-owned institutions that provide financial buffer zones to protect their families from economic shock.

In the garments sector, workforce empowerment groups are formed among staff, who meet to collectively demand their workplace rights and entitlements; while amongst marginalized sex workers, such as the Tangail Brothel workers, groups have been able to collectively re-establish their communities after eviction. These diverse platforms create sustainable spaces for marginalized people to raise their voices as a group and participate in making decisions about their future by advocating for change.

We recognize that to overcome poverty, all the members of a community must be empowered to work together to create change. Our work encourages men and boys to increasingly realize the importance of gender equality in achieving this goal, and to understand the value that empowered women bring to their families and communities.

CARE has developed tools and methods that help men and boys to reflect critically on gender discrimination and violence against women and girls. We nurture male champions of gender equality who lead the change in men’s mindsets around gender norms, including women’s decision-making and ownership of assets, equitable sharing of household responsibilities and violence against women within families. This process recognizes the fact that men and boys face unique barriers and can make their own contributions in the journey towards gender equality.