After a focus group discussion with the evaluation team¹, Ato Lemma, a schoolteacher in Hakim, Hararge asked rhetorically, "What do I want for my family and myself? And what do my friends and neighbors want? What do you want for your family and yourself?" and answered his question by saying, "Isn't it a healthy, happy and prosperous life."

How can this be achieved? To have a healthy, happy and prosperous life one would need to have access to clean water, good basic education, good healthcare, clean air, food, shelter and income generating opportunity. Most of all one needs to have the freedom to choose. This is true regardless of whether one lives in the developed or developing world.

Water, education, healthcare, clean air and land are shared resources and in most countries governments control their provisions and availability. Government's produce and supply or regulate these resources. However, in most developing countries availability, quality and access are constrained by lack of government resources, weak supervision and management of government resources or corruption and indifference.

It is also constraint by citizens' incomplete understanding of their citizenship rights, responsibilities and entitlements to public basic services. Around the world, including Ethiopia, citizens fear public officials and civil servants. Many citizens are afraid to challenge these public officials and public servants regarding their service delivery performance.

Likewise, public officials and civil servants have incomplete understanding of their duties and accountability to citizens. Community involvement in the planning, budgeting and implementation of public basic services delivery is at best limited or absent. Public forums where public officials, public sector service providers and citizens meet tend to be dominated by public officials speech making. No serious and systematic attempted is made to gather data on the problems and priorities of citizens neither do public officials provide useful information that citizens can use to address their service needs.

1. The evaluation of the Pilot Social Accountability Project was carried out by Dr. Samuel Taddesse, Team Leader, Biraj Swain, Social Accountability Expert, Merga Afeta, Project Design, Implementation & Management Expert, Gadissa Bultosa, M&E Expert under contract with IPE International, New Delhi, India and the World Bank, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Sihdartha Patnaik provided program management support from New Delhi, India.

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