Governance Cooperation Fund

Eligibility Criteria

Priority Themes

The Governance Cooperation Fund (GCF) focuses on selected and specific governance objectives to distinguish it from other funds and enhance possibilities for assessing outcomes. The focus this year is to improve the demand side of good governance by supporting innovations in three themes:

Theme one: Active public involvement in discussion of corruption through access to information and public participation

Theme two: Pro-poor budgeting covering the policy making, planning and budgeting processes and doing this in ways which allows for the provision of information on the management of state finances to citizens and giving attention to gender equality and the participation of women

Theme three: Policymakers and service providers improve services for the poor through one or more of the following:

1. Strengthening people's voice and particularly the poor in planning and monitoring services
2. Introducing measures to assess whether resources allocated for services particularly to the poor actually reach the service providers, the effectiveness and efficiency of these transfers and utilization by the service providers
3. Introducing effective instruments to assess quality of services in a manner that creates the environment for greater transparency and accountability to the citizens and particularly the poor
4. Strengthening capacity amongst policy makers and service providers to be able to use effective participatory and consultative instruments to engage with citizens
5. Introducing service delivery policies and instruments that effectively consider and are inclusive of the poor and the marginalized

These could be legal and judicial services (e.g., legal aid, legal information, law enforcement by courts, and police); administrative public services, social (e.g., primary care, health education [primary and adult), financial or other priority services identified in relevant national poverty reduction strategies and Country Strategy and Programs. Applications would be for country specific innovations and a single application could cover one or more themes for one or more countries.

In addition the GCF could support research on how to achieve a high performance public sector in Asia-Pacific that can better serve the interests of the poor. The focus of the research will be on reforms, which increase participation of the poor and their advocates in policymaking and policy implementation that will lead to improved services for the poor.

Submissions for research will need to indicate the level of demand for the research outputs, and identify the envisaged mechanism for utilizing the outputs to inform and strengthen the design of governance programs.

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Eligibility Criteria

All GCF applications must comply with the aforementioned themes and illustrate:

• how the initiative will contribute to the DMC's poverty reduction strategy; and
• how it will contribute to the delivery of ADB's governance strategy in the Country Strategy and Programs or sub-regional or regional SPs.

Specific references to relevant documents will be necessary to enable validation and verification.

Regional departments, resident missions as well as operations-support departments/offices will be eligible to access the GCF.