To strengthen the principal of transparency and community participation, as a key strategy to improve performance, pwp’s implementation unit has pursued an active strategy to strengthen its relations with beneficiaries and all segments of society, especially women, the marginalized and the poor. Pwp interacts positively with the opinions and complaints it receives. It has been working continuously to develop a mechanism for communication and for addressing complaints in an interactive manner.
The unit has leveraged regional and international experiences to improve quick interaction with the complaints, enquiries and opinions of the public and beneficiaries alike. In spite of the fact that pwp had been in the forefront in this endeavor, it continuous to show keenness to improve the system to achieve an even quicker response. In implementation of recommendations by the world bank to scale-up this experience, pwp adopted and implemented a grs system, an acronym for grievance redress system, that has contributed to the improvement of performance in pwp.
Goal
The grs system aims at allowing the public and beneficiaries an opportunity to communicate their complaints and opinions to officers of the project, in a quick and transparent manner. The project had traditionally received complaint and opinions of beneficiaries during the course of implementation of the projects and, at times, even after the completion of the project. This used to be through a complaint box made available at the project site or at the project management office.
In order to accelerate response time, pwp established the grs system to enable the staff to be more responsive and give immediate feedback to the public and beneficiaries. The system will also contribute to educating the beneficiaries of their rights to effectively participate in bringing projects to successful completion and to improve beneficiaries satisfaction.
Indicators confirmed that the pwp’s implementation unit has addressed 70 complaints during the period from january- march, 2017.