Child rights-based social audit of Dien Bien Province's Socio-economic Development Plan

Since 2010s, UNICEF and Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) together with partners in a number of provinces have piloted social audit tools of Citizen Report Cards (CRC) in Ho Chi Minh City and Dien Bien Province; Community Score Cards (CSC) and Gender Audit in Ho Chi Minh City and Quang Ngai Province; and Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) in Tra Vinh Province, Ho Chi Minh City and Dien Bien Province.

After the pilot phase, in 2012, UNICEF and MPI have completed and introduced to public the Toolkit for Social Audit with five tools: Citizen Report Cards (CRC), Community Score Cards (CSC), Gender Audit, Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) and Child-right based Social Audit (CRSA).

In general, social audit method has been gradually received as a management mechanism, which facilitates the development and application of methods, tools and techniques to enable the responsible agencies’ review for enhancement of social performance of an organisation, of a plan or a policy. The social audit tools are highly practical, in line with good governance principles and helpful for revealing the normative “good” by standards. More importantly, those tools assist the collection of essential information and implications for strengthening the effectiveness of decision-making process, resource allocation and service delivery in general. This role becomes significant in the context of on-going planning reform in both national and provincial levels for more focus at social impacts of social and economic development plans (SEDP)