The local environment for community accountability in Yemen

This paper aimed at evaluating the general community environment necessary for implementing the community accountability principle in Yemen through analyzing to what extent the main pillars of accountability are available to adapt the community accountability’s patterns, expressions, and tools used to match with the Yemeni society. This paper has concluded that the general legislative framework of civil society’s involvement in the development process including the community accountability is, to some extent, the suitable atmosphere for an effective partnership between the government and NGOs despite the fact that implementation of partnership between both parties is still limited and the community accountability has not been accepted by different institutions of State, with emphasis on the international NGOs’ ability to implement community accountability using various tools in this regard although they faced difficulty in access to information and are greatly depending on external financing via non-government foreign organizations.

In view of the citizens’ recognition of their inherent right to hold the government institutions accountable, their actual participation in this respect is still poor. The study has come up with numerous recommendations focusing on introducing the community accountability within the country in a way that suits the social, political and economic contest, being a substantial element of development, and also on training, capacity building and diversification of community accountability’s mechanisms and tools as well as enhancement of local organizations’ financial sustainability and minimizing dependence on external financing as far as possible.