Excellencies, colleagues, Ladies, and Gentlemen,

I am pleased to join you this morning to congratulate the seven Civil Society Organizations who have been selected through a competitive process to be part of the implementation of this project and to contribute to strengthening the sub-national administrations (SNAs) for an inclusive and accountable sub-national service delivery system. I also thank the seven civil organizations for their interest to be part of this initiative.

Excellencies, and distinguished guests

This grant to the seven civil society organizations is supported by the project “Strengthening Transparency and Accountability (STA) in Local Governance through Civic Engagement” and will help enhance people participation in Sub-National planning and budgeting in the three municipalities. The STA project aims to:

• Empower women and men, particularly under-represented groups and to meaningfully engage and hold sub-national administrations (SNAs) accountable for their decisions and gender-responsive service delivery actions, through increased knowledge, capacity, and access to information.
• Promote CSO participation concerning policies, plans and budgets for the sub-national democratic development.

The project directly contributes to the implementation of the Royal Government of Cambodia's 10 years National Program for Sub-National Democratic Development (NP 2),

Through this grant support, the CSOs at the local level will be able to play their transformational role to engage in policy, local planning, and budgeting processes to further promote social accountability. Furthermore, the grant will contribute to increasing awareness among citizens of their rights and knowledge of local administration, and in monitoring the progresses at the local level.  

This is the second group of CSOs who have received these grants. In the first sub-grantee selection process carried out from July 2023 to June 2024, three CSOs in three municipalities were awarded grants focusing on strengthening community youth network, capacity building research-based advocacy and awareness raising and digitization. I am pleased to share that we have observed some remarkable progress through this process including youth active participation in the affairs of municipalities, Sangkat-municipality Planning”, and support for the ID-Poor programme.

Excellencies, ladies, and gentlemen,

UNDP, together with its development partners, is supporting the Royal Government of Cambodia to achieve its vision for Social Accountability and Transparency in Local Governance. Some other activities supported so far include the following:

• We have helped conduct an Information Ecosystem mapping to find out (i) what information is available in target municipalities, (ii) if the contents are relevant to people’s interests/needs (iii) how different groups of people access to info, and (iv) developing effective ways to reach out to people to make good use of the available information.
• We are supporting the participatory monitoring and evaluation of the National Programme 2. UNDP is working closely with NCDD-S to undertake the Governance Survey which is a measure of (i) service delivery, (ii) responsiveness, (iii) civic engagement, (iv) transparency and (v) accountability of the services provided by Sub-National Administrations.
• UNDP is providing support for building the capacity of local media, and promoting information, and digital literacy (MIDL) in the three municipalities. The initiative will contribute to enhancing people’s knowledge and critical thinking, which is an important condition for people’s meaningful participation in local governance.