Amidst a heightened awareness of global challenges facing civil society in the early 2000s, the International Advocacy Non-Governmental Organisations (IANGO) Workshops served as a platform for international reflection and dialogue. Co-facilitated by CIVICUS and the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, and financed through grants from the Ford Foundation, these workshops aimed to create space for collective reflection and strategic thinking. At the inaugural IANGO Workshop, in 2003, participants advocated for cross-sector accountability standards to be formalized through an International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGO) Accountability Charter.
A task force of several recurring participants developed the INGO Accountability Charter, first presenting it at the 2005 IANGO Workshop. On June 6, 2006, The Accountability Charter was officially adopted with eleven founding signatories: ActionAid International, Amnesty International, CIVICUS World Alliance for Citizen Participation, Consumers International, Greenpeace International, Oxfam International, International Save the Children Alliance, Survival International, International Federation Terre des Hommes, Transparency International, and World YWCA. The Charter’s foundational elements included a self-sustaining Membership fee model and a Reporting Framework for international CSOs.
Later in 2006, during the next IANGO Workshop, discussions shifted towards the sustainable implementation of the Accountability Charter. Initially, the secretariat was held by Member, CIVICUS, with a Charter Management Committee helping steer the Charter’s development and implementation. In February 2008, to reinforce credibility and uphold integrity, the Accountability Charter was registered in the UK, hosted by Amnesty International, as the INGO Accountability Charter Company, and governance was transferred to a Board of Directors. Established to execute the Accountability Charter’s mandate, the INGO Accountability Charter Company has evolved with civil society over time, listening to our Membership, updating the kinds of standards (and later commitments) that we work with, and re-examining what accountability means.
In consultation with our Members, in 2016, we officially changed our name to Accountable Now, to better reflect the mission and public recognition of the organization.
Also in the late 2010s, Accountable Now worked alongside other prominent accountability initiatives to develop and launch the Global Standard for CSO Accountability. In the early 2020s, Accountable Now reevaluated its Membership model to make sure our offerings were in line with current sector needs. In 2022, we expanded our support beyond the traditional International CSO Membership model to include organizations and networks working at the national and community-level. After, in 2023, we revamped our Membership program, introducing Tiered Membership levels, so organizations could customize the ways they engage with the Accountable Now community.
Through ongoing dialogue with Members, we also revisited our Reporting process after hearing that it no longer reflected current capacities and resources or aligned with other Reporting requirements. As a result, we made our traditional Reporting Framework optional and expanded the mandate of our Independent Review Panel. This shift enables organizations to share policies, practices, reports, and other materials for timely and relevant accountability insights, without creating an additional report, making the process more flexible, meaningful, and responsive to Members’ needs.
Around this time, Accountable Now began to take an even more holistic approach to helping civil society ‘do good better,’ by partnering with funders. In this way, amidst global funding cuts, Accountable Now diversified its revenue, ensuring the Membership services and program continue to thrive.
Many different civil society organizations have pitched in and ensured that Accountable Now continues to operate and help civil society do good better. For a majority of our existence, we have been hosted even when we have separate registration. Over the years, we’ve been hosted by CIVICUS, Amnesty International, and the International Civil Society Centre. Currently, Accountable Now is an independent nonprofit, with fiscal sponsorship by Accountability Lab in the US.
Read more about our strategic partnership, here!
In the early days, Accountable Now’s (then the INGO Accountability Charter) reporting principles and accountability approach was based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). This work aimed for standards and accountability measures that reflected the different operating areas of INGOs, such as respect for human rights, independence, transparency, good governance, among others. It was designed as a quality assurance mechanism for INGO accountability.
Recognizing the need for a common voice on accountability that can take the range of contexts that CSOs operate in, and building off of the ethos of the GRI, in 2015, Accountable Now collaborated with prominent civil society networks to design a set of commitments that unify what accountability looks like for civil society organisations, leading to the Global Standard for CSO Accountability. This initiative followed a bottom-up approach, largely led by Majority World organizations and networks. Through this co-creation process, the 12 Commitments Framework was developed, reflecting a shared vision of what accountability and responsibility mean for CSOs. The commitments represent a shift whereby accountability was seen as both downwards and outwards, rather than only upwards to donors and governments. We also started to adopt the term Dynamic Accountability to describe our approach, whereby we concretize our commitment to accountability as mechanisms that are continuous, based on feedback, and center those closest to the problem. Our approach to accountability therefore shifted to a model that supports organisations to continuously learn and reflect.
The Global Standard for CSO Accountability was officially launched in 2017, and the 12 Commitments were integrated into the work of Accountable Now. Accountable Now also served as the secretariat for the Global Standard, until 2023, where the partnership’s Secretariat function became decentralized.