Over 200 or­gan­i­sa­tions are reg­is­tered to par­tic­i­pate in a vir­tu­al gath­er­ing on Tues­day that will ex­am­ine and un­der­score “The Role of Civ­il So­ci­ety in Ac­count­able and Re­spon­si­ble De­vel­op­ment.”

It is a joint in­ter­na­tion­al com­mem­o­ra­tion of World NGO Day, which marked an­nu­al­ly on Feb­ru­ary 27. Non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions across T&T are be­ing asked to an­swer the call to “Mind Yuh Busi­ness”.

The com­mem­o­ra­tive on­line event is the third of its kind to be host­ed in as many years by the civ­il so­ci­ety dig­i­tal plat­form CSO Go with The Crop­per Foun­da­tion (TCF), in col­lab­o­ra­tion with var­i­ous non-prof­it ac­tors.

This year’s di­rect ap­peal to NGOs to Mind Yuh Busi­ness harks back to the Mind Yuh Own Busi­ness (MY­OB) guide for civ­il so­ci­ety on “how to keep track of T&T’s en­er­gy bil­lions”, pro­duced some 15 years ago by TCF un­der the T&T Sus­tain­able De­vel­op Net­work Ini­tia­tive.

“World NGO Day has pro­vid­ed a much-need­ed, ded­i­cat­ed space for NGO ca­pac­i­ty-build­ing and net­work­ing at all lev­els. We be­lieve it’s time to go fur­ther now to con­sid­er what ac­count­abil­i­ty ought to mean with­in and out­side the sec­tor, and we’re ac­tive­ly ex­plor­ing how we can play our role in cre­at­ing a more ac­count­able so­ci­ety,” CEO of The Crop­per Foun­da­tion, Omar Mo­hammed, said of the ini­tia­tive.

The day will kick off with a keynote from In­ter-Amer­i­can Com­mis­sion for Hu­man Rights (IACHR) pres­i­dent Rober­ta Clarke.

Si­mul­ta­ne­ous work­shops cov­er­ing me­dia, leg­isla­tive and pol­i­cy en­gage­ment will be led by Caribbean me­dia icon Ju­lian Rogers, di­rec­tor of Le­gal Ser­vices at the T&T Par­lia­ment Chan­tal La Roche and tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor at the Fondes Aman­des Com­mu­ni­ty Re­for­esta­tion Project Kem­ba Jaramo­gi re­spec­tive­ly.

A pan­el dis­cus­sion sur­vey­ing the state of in­ter­sec­tion­al ad­vo­ca­cy among civ­il so­ci­ety or­gan­i­sa­tions in T&T will al­so run con­cur­rent­ly.