The Civil Society for Accountable Governance and Citizen Security Project, also known as Participación Cívica, was a five-year project funded by USAID and implemented by Counterpart International in partnership with IREX, Palladium, and IFES.

The project strengthened and developed the institutional capacity of civil society organizations in Guatemala to play a more effective role in addressing citizen security, accountable governance, and corruption issues.

• IREX empowered local organizations in Guatemala to strengthen their organizational capacities in communications and media in order to improve and expand the effectiveness of their advocacy efforts.
• Guatemala is consistently ranked highly on global corruption indices. Participación Cívica supported independent professional journalists to use data journalism methodology as a research route to implement investigative research projects.
• IREX engaged journalists and media outlets to build relationships that lead to accurate, thoughtful, and frequent media coverage of civil society-backed accountability initiatives.

• Support civil society efforts to promote accountable governance and combat corruption.
• Strengthen institutional and technical capacity of targeted CSOs.
• Support investigative journalism work by utilizing data scraping techniques and by developing and publishing investigative research projects based on data journalism methodologies.

• Improving local organizations' communications: IREX trained civil society organizations working on advocacy and governance activities in Guatemala on effective and successful communications strategies.
• Long-term data journalism mentoring: Through a data research course that combined remote tutoring support with traditional in-class training, IREX strengthened 14 journalists’ theoretical and technical capacities to foster transparency and anti-corruption in Guatemala. This program resulted in a portfolio of stories on transparency and anti-corruption issues in Guatemala.

Tara Susman-Peña, Senior Technical Advisor
E-mail: tsusmanpena@irex.org