By: Joy Aceron
Coachi, Colombia | 2 September 2025
Warm greetings to everyone.
I feel very excited and happy that this is finally happening. For Prof. Jonathan and I, this is 2 or 3 years in the making.
I have been in a lot of international events and this group is hands down with the strongest link to and representation of the broadest people especially from the excluded who are always talked about in international events but never truly represented. That alone makes this event a success.
It is such a great honor and privilege to share this space and hopefully this learning journey with all of you.
My name is Joy Aceron. I am the convenor-director of Government Watch.
Government Watch or G Watch is a national movement of citizen action for accountability in the Philippines. It is present in 11 regions and it has pioneered social accountability initiatives on education, health and other social services.
I am also a researcher at the Accountability Research Center since 2017.
Before I go to the work that I would like to present, let me share briefly a personal background that informs my politics.
I grew up in a poor family in the province or rural agricultural Philippines. Because I know even as a young kid that opportunities were rare for the poor like me, I tried to excel in school, fortunately finishing high education as a scholar through the public education system. I started my activism in the youth movement to campaign for the best president that we never had. We lost, but since after, I have been an advocate against corruption and a staunch believer of democracy premised on human dignity.
The work that I’d like to share are two that are interrelated.
The first one is how to advance the transformative political agenda of transparency, participation, and accountability.
We have an acronym for it - TPA - transparency, participation, and accountability.
Let me discuss the first one to by sharing its background.
When I joined G-Watch in 2004, it was very successful in conducting monitoring of textbooks. Textbook Count, the name of the initiative, stopped corruption in textbook delivery, lowered the prices of textbooks, cut the procurement time, brought trust to the Department of Education, mobilized broad based civil society organizations in the country. Textbook Count provided a blueprint for social accountability all over the globe.
Even with such a success, I knew at that time that such best practice is not enough.
We have a lot of cases like Textbook Count in the Philippines. We call them best practices, patches of green, models both in government (national, mostly local) and civil society that are success cases of reforms/ change - on governance, IP rights, anti-mining, education, poverty reduction, health, etc.
While it felt good to have these successes, I thought it was not enough. They are bound to be challenged, undermined and are therefore highly unsustainable. More importantly, they are, by and large, unable to change the structure of power that continued to be in the hands of a few.
I felt these are mere bubbles/ islands of best practices, while what we need to change is an entire archipelago of bad governance, abuse and corruption. These abuses that we want to correct happen because power is concentrated in the hands of a few. And power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. We want a better world where power is democratized and where abuse never happens.
I thought that the pathway towards such powershift would be to strengthen public accountability through citizen empowerment to democratize power. There is a need to connect the dots so that the many patches of green can actually transform power. This also means there is a need for changes in institutions or the rules of the game such that it will be conducive to citizens claiming power.
This is what I mean when I say of the transformative political agenda of transparency, participation, and accountability.
And our recent work shows an example of it: our health monitoring initiative called PRO-Health mobilized and enabled ordinary citizens to ensure effective and efficient inclusive health services, withstanding the challenges of closing civic space to be able to improve services and make government responsive and accountable, particularly in ensuring health and social services are prioritized.
This is connected to our broader agenda of building constituencies for reforms to activate the different mechanisms in ‘accountability ecosystem,’ which consists not only accountability processes in government and in civil society, but as well as accountability mechanisms, such as state audit institutions and checks-and-balances, including elections and parties, where front and center of reforms are citizens.
The second work I would like to share is how to learn better from grassroots experience to more effectively inform knowledge development and donor priorities.
It is important to give the context of this too.
I mentioned that G-Watch has pioneered social accountability initiatives. We get invited in many international events where we share our experience.
There was a point in 2012/ 2013 that I felt very dissatisfied with how our lessons are actually being extracted and distilled and shared. And how supposed lessons from our experience were informing other initiatives that are being supported by lots and lots of money.
Why is this important? This is important because wrong lessons from your experience being funded by a lot of money would mean your work justifying other work that simply misses the point and therefore could be causing harm. So I felt that it is very important that lessons from our experience are distilled properly and that our voices are heard in those lessons.
That’s when I met Prof. Jonathan and I had a rare privilege to help establish Accountability Research Center (ARC).
This is ARC’s main mandate: to learn better from experience of the grassroots so that its lessons are distilled well, shared properly and communicated effectively. By effective, we mean to inform practices for it to be better and set research and knowledge agenda so that it can inform the donors and international development partners how to do TPA properly.
Our recent work that is most relevant here is our education monitoring called Multiply-Ed. Our action research on vertical integration or multi-level civil society monitoring and advocacy has led to one international funding facility for civil society being informed by it and thus supporting Multiply-Ed. Our new publication shares how Multiply-Ed reinforces an official congressional oversight on education reform. Such initiative has helped broaden the youth movement as it catalyzes accountability in education governance.
By building power at different levels from grassroots to international, we can advance the transformative political agenda of TPA.
Because again, we do not only want bubbles of inspiring stories or patches of best practices and models, we want a better world.
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See cited works:
https://accountabilityresearch.org/monitoring_political_meaning/
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