Building tools that last: Lessons in sustainability from HackCorruption
As HackCorruption comes to a close and the funding ecosystem in civic tech becomes increasingly uncertain amid shifting perceptions among global funding institutions, adaptability and tapping into diverse sustainability approaches matter more than ever. Throughout this project, we have observed that the risks of not planning for sustainability compound over the life of a tool. […]
Building Civil Society Wayfinder to Close the Proximity Gap
This article is one of three reflecting on Civil Society Wayfinder’s first months. It gives a comprehensive overview with valuable insights from organizations featured as part of the campaign. For more a more in depth look into the adaptive and collaborative heart of Wayfinder read Yamone Aye’s What Community Connections Taught Me. For a the […]
What Community Connections Taught Me: Reflections on Mapping Civil Society Across the Global South
In 2025, the global democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) sector ran into a wall of profound uncertainty. Large funding cuts and policy shifts by the United States government disrupted long-standing support systems for NGOs worldwide. The effects were immediate: local organizations lost critical funding, ongoing programs and staff were paused or dropped, and the […]
Lessons from Mapping Civil Society in an Era of Aid Uncertainty
In January 2025, USAID was dissolved, and this created significant uncertainty across the international development sector, particularly for democracy, rights, and governance work. Many organisations in this space rely on donor funding to sustain advocacy, accountability, civic engagement, and human rights programmes, so changes in funding priorities have direct implications for their visibility, stability, and […]
What five years of celebrating good governance heroes taught us about the value of principled partnership
Integrity Icon, Accountability Lab’s campaign to celebrate exceptional public servants, has always rested on the notion that citizens respond more readily to real people than to abstract institutions, and that publicly celebrating integrity can shift how a society talks about public service. It is our longest running campaign, focused on “naming and faming” civil servants […]
Strategies for sustainable democracy, rights and governance work
We may not be in a pandemic like COVID-19, but civil society is traversing unprecedented territory and managing a tone of change. The shrinking civic space and receding funding base globally constitute a moment of crisis and introduce a complexity into the context that will affect us for a long while. Complexity is the new […]