In 2017 RACI was the organization chosen to co-manage the Latin America and Caribbean Innovation Fund granted by Tides Center and Innovation for Change for Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Network received a total of 72 project proposals from several countries in the region, including El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala and Ecuador, among others. The countries that submitted the most proposals were Colombia, Mexico and Argentina with 17, 13 and 12 projects respectively.
From the closing date of the call for proposals, RACI evaluated all proposals under the same objective scoring system which is based on the analysis of the following categories: profile of the organization, project feasibility, project characteristics, project rigour and budget evaluation.
The themes proposed to present the projects were: “Enabling Environment” and “Transparency and Accountability”.
Based on the results of RACI’s evaluation, the winning organizations were: the Communication and Development Institute (ICD), located in Uruguay, which won the US$5,000 prize; FUNDEPS, whose headquarters are in Argentina; and the Infodevelopment Network Corporation of Ecuador, both winners of US$2500 each.
The proposals selected were diverse and innovative. In the case of ICD, the organization proposes to develop a self-assessment tool, to be executed through a web app or optimized version of a web page, adaptable to mobile devices. Through the application, the organization will be able to visualize its status in terms of accountability according to standards and good practices and in accordance with the CSO Global Accountability Standard. Thus, through access to the web app, the organization will receive basic indications of next steps and guidelines for the construction of an improvement plan. The final product of the project will be a regional public good, with free access to all civil society organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
For its part, the FUNDEPS project seeks to expand the efforts made to develop a website that provides information and good practices for citizen monitoring of infrastructure projects. It will be based on the MOCI website: Monitoreo Ciudadano: http://moci.fundeps.org/ . This website was previously developed by FUNDEPS and contains cases of good monitoring practices from both Argentina and Latin America. However, the aim is to broaden the scope of the site’s functionalities to make it a collaborative platform that allows the interaction of communities and civil society organizations.
Finally, the Infodevelopment Network Corporation Foundation’s project consists of the implementation of interactive electronic modules adaptable to any public space such as: parks, shopping malls, streets; that allow citizens to connect to the Internet once they interact in a fun informative trivia about CSOs so that the citizen can be informed and linked to any current program. The aim is to improve the visibility of CSOs and the project was called “Electronic islands of social integration”.