Civic engagement plays a crucial role in promoting sustainable development, peace, good governance, human rights and strengthening democracy. However, Ethiopian civic actors have faced constraints in actively and meaningfully participating in these areas due to various challenges, including legal, political and capacity-related.
The USAID Ethiopia Civic Engagement Activity aims to strengthen Ethiopia’s social fabric. By fostering a vibrant civic environment, the initiative seeks to mitigate conflicts and empower marginalized groups.
The USAID Ethiopia Civic Engagement (ECE) activity endeavors to overcome deep-seated citizen distrust and foster inclusive dialogue, respect for human rights, and citizen-responsive governance to strengthen Ethiopia’s social fabric and advance sustainable development goals. The activity supports inclusive dialogue, human rights, and effective governance through civil society organizations and community-based actors.
The four-year activity will issue more than 50 grants to civil society organizations, universities, institutes and others to conduct research, run training, pilot novel civic engagement ideas, run advocacy campaigns and more.
ECE uses the collective impact approach, which calls for multiple organizations or entities to align their individual agendas in favor of a shared common agenda, will be used to foster multi-stakeholder civic partnerships. This approach will be activated via problem-driven iterative adaptation as a core methodology to support joint action among local system actors, deconstruct complex challenges and address root issues. Through this approach, civil society networks can co-create activities and build capacity for themselves and the sector. The ECE and its partners serve as facilitators and supporters in fostering community, connection and trust.
Program Goals
ECE uses a collective impact approach in which civic actors identify, understand and determine solutions to citizen-defined issues in an iterative process. Through identified cluster-led organizations, ECE brings together a cross-section of organizations and individuals — including youth, women, traditional leaders, faith-based organizations and others — to work together to better understand the issues, determine solutions and address the causes while simultaneously building their organizational skills, comity, connection and trust.
ECE supports 20 clusters in key parts of Ethiopia which will promote issue-based partnerships and inclusive dialogue that leads to improved governance, operating out of three hubs in Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa and Dessie. Based on the survey of citizen needs and priorities, ECE has selected a set of initial issues for support through these clusters based on the findings from its citizen survey. For Addis Ababa and Sheger City, the issues are water, fiscal transparency and inflation. For Dire Dawa, the issues are water, inflation, roads and fiscal transparency. For Dessie, the topics are inflation, peace and security, job opportunity and fiscal transparency.
