In a move to maintain public confidence and to ensure efficiency and effectiveness of various civil society organizations (CSOs) in the country, CSOs umbrella of the National Civil Society Council of Liberia (NCSCL) have adopted a number of professional standards that will guide them in their operations.
Popularization of the professional standards document was done in the port city of Buchanan, Grand Bassa County with several CSO groupings signing onto the document. The initiative was supported by Mercy Corps, Kvinna till Kvinna (KtK) with funding support from the European Union (EU), Irish Aid and the Government of Sweden.
Speaking at the official launch of the document, the Chairperson of the CSO Council, Madam Loretta Alethea Pope-Kai explained that the document will set the standard to ensure and strengthen public confidence in the integrity, quality and effectiveness of member organizations and their progress.
According to her, the professional standards are created to serve as a participatory regulatory tool for the implementation of different development programs in Liberia.
“The standard defines financial, operations, and ethical code of conduct for CSOs and the NCSCL. These high and object standards are intended to guide the CSOs in policy development and setting all internal control measures as functional, reliable and efficient CSOs meeting all compliance regulations and requirements to operate in Liberia,” said the NCSCL boss.
“Madam Pope-Kai stated that these standards will also enable the NCSCL to review its needs for policy development amendment and will serve as a guide to developing its monitoring and tracking tool, stressing: “It is therefore incumbent on the NCSCL to ensure that all of its members are to certify their organization is incompliance with the agreed upon standards.”
“The roll out of these standards will be the sole responsibility of the National Civil Society Council of Liberia and its members to support compliance of CSOs to legal, good governance, transparency and accountability processes,” she furthered.
In addition to the professional standards, she disclosed that NCSCL has also developed five different policies, which include financial policy, communication strategies, human resource plan, strategy plan and procurement processes.
“And we want to say in this manner to witnesses from our member based organizations, our county coordinators, our regional coordinators, that we are happy, and collectively we are making history to improve the workings of National Civil Society Council of Liberia. So we want to thank you for your support and we can safely say that these policies will not be like other policies that will sit on the shelves and get dusted but we are going to make sure they are well implemented,” she added.
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