Amnesty International’s reporting to Accountable Now: indicator owners

Amnesty International’s report submission to Accountable Now is based on analysis and inputs from International Secretariat staff who have oversight over different areas of accountability. These members of staff – internally referred to as ‘Accountable Now indicator owners’ – assess performance, reflecting on the Independent Review Panel’s (IRP) feedback, movement data and their own expertise.

The draft report is disseminated for comment to relevant internal stakeholders and key weaknesses identified are raised with Senior Management for action. The final report and IRP feedback is shared with the entire movement and distributed on Amnesty International’s websites.

Improvements in the reporting process

With a view to further embedding Accountable Now’s commitments into the quality assurance and organisational development processes, a set of improvements were made to the  reporting process:

a) All Accountable Now standards are fully incorporated into internal accountability mechanisms, primarily the Standard Action Reports, which is the main reporting tool completed by all Amnesty International national entities. Movement wide results were discussed during webinars to increase awareness of performance against different accountability standards and to create ownership over solutions for improvement at the national level. Particular emphasis was placed on issues of gender, diversity and participation which had also been highlighted in the Panel’s feedback.

b) Amnesty International takes the necessary steps to ensure that assessments made for the annual performance would inform future planning. The group responsible for preparing the report (staff from Finance, Governance, Campaigns, Law and Policy, Growth and Research) works together to discuss feedback received from the Panel and steps to improve the report preparation. Accountable Now’s reporting parameters and guiding questions help stimulate thinking about Amnesty International’s accountability performance and are adapted when necessary to help Amnesty International’s reflective process.

This way Amnesty International uses key feedback about their accountability performance (from the Panel’s feedback, movement-wide reporting and reflection) to inform decision-making in a timely manner.

A separate meeting with management is scheduled to operationalise specific decisions to improve accountability in the current operational plan.

Mainstreaming accountability

Amnesty International is aiming to do more, especially at the level of mainstreaming accountability standards across the movement. Currently, there are some good examples: Every year, AI Spain creates a comparative report between movement-wide performance and AI Spain performance against Accountable Now standards, but special efforts will be needed to enhance accountability systems at the regional levels as a distributed model of Amnesty International is becoming reality.