Governance & Reform Advisory

About GRA: GRA stems from decades of work formulating and implementing change and policy transformation in governments and organisations. The roots of GRA’s work are in United Nations and other development organisations, including USAID, DFID and Civil Service Commissions, towards reforms, capacity building and grassroots development. Based on experiences in various countries, especially post-2001 Afghanistan, it became evident that getting reform right does not only require systemic changes, but also community level engagement to identify and address challenges. Wars, conflicts, poverty, governments’ broken structure/system, disturbances of fabrics of society, lack of transparency and trust, and absence of citizen engagement in to their own development processes inspired the establishment of GRA. The most crucial factor for good governance is to engage people as the key stakeholders of their own development processes - from situation analysis to policy formulation, systems development, planning and implementation. The theory of change is to value the people's edge. Therefore, for GRA, governance means that all stakeholders bring local communities, including women, at the center of decision-making. By mobilizing a team of experts and talented young minds GRA’s founder, Rahela Sidiqi, envisioned to merge theory and practice and create an enabling environment for people to improve their quality of life. GRA Mission: Enhanced performance in any organisation, including government agencies, is a product of good governance, accountability, transparency and trust, which lead to improvements in living standards of the people. However, a traditional oversight has been to mainly focus on structure. Instead attention needs to be paid to processes. It is important to assess how governance really operates, and not merely how it's described on paper. At GRA, our mission is to address the organisational challenges of governance. We do so by tackling governance gaps, that.