Responsabilisation : Processus d'audit et progrès en matière d'engagement

One of the first questions to answer when doing accountability work is whether young people were genuinely part of the process from start to finish:

• Were youth voices present and meaningfully involved throughout?
• Did they have real influence?
• Were their contributions reflected in outcomes?
• Did the experience match the promise?

Commencez par revoir le Normes de participation et de co-création OGP. The standards set out the minimum requirements a government must meet at each stage of the OGP journey, from co-creation to implementation and monitoring. These standards are the baseline for assessing any process. Knowing them gives youth organizations a clear way to spot where governments fall short, and where accountability is needed.

Another valuable practice is comparing young people’s experience of OGP processes with their experience of other participation spaces (such as elections or public consultations). This comparison helps reveal whether the process in that country or locality is actually building more trust in public participation, or simply repeating the same patterns. A simple way to do this is to survey young people on their trust in public institutions before the OGP process begins. Then, ask them again about their trust in the OGP process once they have experienced it. Over time, this evidence can be a powerful tool for demonstrating the value of open government.

Youth accountability usually fails because organizations lack the technical skills to speak the government’s language, read data, design indicators, and engage credibly with formal assessment processes. Building those skills is itself an act of open government.

• Train youth organizations in basic monitoring and evaluation (M&E) skills, such as how to design indicators, collect data, document findings, and present evidence in ways that are credible to government and institutional audiences. Young people who can speak the language of results are much harder to dismiss.¹
• The IRM is one of the most powerful tools available to youth organizations: its reports are independent, public, and based on input from both government and civil society. It is important to understand what the IRM assesses, when it publishes, and how civil society can submit evidence.
  • Ask the OGP Point of Contact or MSF to inform youth co-leads when IRM assessments are taking place, and ensure youth co-leads are included in the process of providing evidence and information to the IRM researcher.
  • Once the IRM assessment groundwork is in place, any organization can request to speak with an IRM researcher directly to share perspectives on implementation of OGP processes. This is a formal opportunity to ensure youth perspectives are captured in an independent evaluation, no need to wait to be invited.
  • IRM findings can inform participation, conversations, and advocacy work. When the IRM identifies a gap in a commitment or a co-creation process, that’s a valuable reference point. Bringing IRM findings into MSF meetings, government conversations, and public communications helps ground advocacy in independent evidence.
  • For OGP Local members, the IRM dans une boîte toolkit offers practical tools and recommendations to set up local monitoring bodies and evaluate the OGP process.

Delivery is not the same as impact. An implementer can tick every process and commitment milestone, and still leave young people’s lives unchanged. Assessing whether a process or commitment made a real difference for young people requires collecting evidence from the ground up, in a systematic way. Here are some practical strategies that make this possible even in low-resource settings:

• Implement community scorecards completed by young people to assess the quality and responsiveness of a government during a participatory process. This turns lived experience into structured evidence. See Tool 8: Youth Accountability Scorecard and Community Feedback for a ready-to-use format.
• Use simple data collection templates, in paper and digital formats, to capture how a commitment is changing conditions for young people at the community level. If a separate data collection process isn’t possible, include a few simple questions in the existing M&E strategy instead. Simple data collection leads to more consistent, comparable results.
• Create formal roles for youth organizations to present evidence of a commitment’s impact at regular review moments, including the biennial stock-take of commitments. Including young people in these spaces ensures their perspectives shape how progress is assessed, not just how it is implemented.

After accountability reviews, findings must be shared back with all stakeholders who participated. This means:

• Publishing findings in accessible, youth-friendly formats, not only in technical reports or through mandatory FOI requests.
• Feeding all monitoring findings, including those developed by youth organizations, into the official accountability record. The member’s OGP repository or website is the IRM’s primary source of evidence, and publishing there enables youth perspectives to be captured in any independent assessment.
• Using accountability findings to inform the next co-creation process.

This is what transforms accountability from a one-time exercise into a continuous improvement process, and builds the trust that sustains long-term youth engagement.