Social Accountability Monitoring would not be effective as a tool if it did not assist the Policy Forum network to meet its strategic goals Policy Forum is an independent body that envisages a future where policy processes are participatory and involve the broad-based engagement of all sectors of society, including NGOs and the people they work with, in an accountable, empowered, informed and informing manner, at all stages in the policy process and at all levels of society.Policy Forum will encourage NGOs to work together to open up and influence policy processes that improve the lives of all people, especially those who are socially disadvantaged and impoverished, in order to empower them to self-organize and become part of a social movement for change.Policy processes will not be truly participatory until people understand how they work, are informed about how decisions are made and how those decisions translate into the services they deliver.

Social Accountability Monitoring provides a systematic framework for building thisunderstanding as far down as the community level. It also empowers people to monitoraccountability from a rights based perspective, which is in keeping with the Policy Forum mission.Despite the fact that Policy Forum is a member-led network, the capacity of members to engage proactively and effectively with the work it does is quite diverse. In order to increase the prevalence of proactive engagement by an wider group of members, there is a need for the secretariat to build the capacity of more members who have traditionally not been in the driving seat to do so more by developing our collective capacity to engage with policy on a substantive level through the use of simple tools that do not require a high level of expertise. The sociala ccountability tool provides a simple way of doing this.