Overview of NGO - Community Complaints Mechanisms - Global Accountability Discussion Series, #2

The Accountability Discussion Papers are a series of documents that describe World Vision’s current practice in accountability and encourage practitioners to take a step back and reflect on what works and why—with the objective being to elicit discussion and stimulate innovation relating to WV’s programmes.
This discussion presents “research-in-progress” undertaken by Global Accountability on complaints handling. It presents findings gathered from a combination of WV’s field programmes, through discussion with accountability staff and a review of published literature.

This paper summarises the various tools that are being implemented by development and relief agencies to receive complaints. Although some of the tools are designed primarily to collect general feedback and information for programme monitoring, they are also used by community members to channel and raise complaints about more serious issues. This paper also describes some tools that are being used in the commercial sector and by governments, and which can be adapted to the NGO context.