Liberia—Civil Society Activity (CSA)

As the Government of Liberia rolls out new measures to prevent a surge in COVID-19 infections and looks ahead to the national elections in 2023, there is increasing demand and opportunity for citizen-responsive reforms to tackle persistent development challenges. Although cooperation between civil society organizations and the government has historically been uneven, new modalities for collaboration are emerging. The Liberia Civil Society Activity (CSA) comes at this opportune time, representing the next phase of civil society-led advocacy programming in Liberia by empowering diverse actors to strengthen feedback loops to sustain reforms.

CSA works to strengthen Liberians’ ability to advocate for policy reforms, policy implementation, and service delivery improvements through multistakeholder coalitions that build feedback loops among the government, civil society organizations, and citizens.

Building on the achievements of the DAI-led Liberia Accountability and Voice Initiative, CSA facilitates the formation of issue-based coalitions. Diverse in membership, the coalitions analyze the critical issues most likely to lead to feasible reforms, co-create advocacy strategies, and translate them into improved policy formation and implementation.

The coalitions apply citizen engagement strategies and use policy dialogue platforms to integrate citizens’ voices in advocacy agendas, disseminating the results of their advocacy efforts to the broader community to encourage continued dialogue. CSA also ensures that coalition members’ achievements are sustainable by building their financial resilience and adaptive capacities and linking them to a pool of Liberian private sector service providers.

Sample Activities

• Map subnational civil society organizations and their advocacy priorities across all counties to identify potential subnational coalition members.
• Use grants under contract co-creation methods to draw in the full range of diverse civil society organizations and identify coalition members that are invested in the issue and have the constituencies and skills to effect change.
• Develop internal governance structure and connectivity within coalitions.
• Conduct a series of national policy dialogue and problem-identification workshops, citizen perception surveys disaggregated by gender, problem analyses at the national and subnational levels, and a feedback loop analysis to select three thematic windows and issues in each theme.
• Implement strategy to attract private sector investment.