“The people have to be seen … as actively involved—given the opportunity—in shaping their own destiny, and not just as passive recipients of the fruits of cunning development programs” Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom [1] Community matters – community responds. Yet many health planners still consider people as passive recipients of programmes. WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan drew attention to this in the global approach to the H1N1 pandemic: “Although the virus has not yet delivered any devastating surprises, we have seen some surprises on other fronts. We anticipated problems in producing enough vaccine fast enough, and this did indeed happen. But we did not anticipate that people would decide not to be vaccinated” [2]. Social audits respond to the voice of different stakeholders, including intended beneficiaries, in order to improve health planning and service delivery. Over the last two decades, government and private donors have increased their demands for evidence of the impacts of their supported programmes, to enhance accountability and transparency of investments. However, most decisions in health care are still taken without benefit of solid evidence from the concerned communities and intended beneficiaries. While it is true that people are increasingly consulted, their voice is still a faint murmur at policy and planning levels. The CIET approach to social audit responds to this long standing shortfall. This Supplement marks CIET’s 25 years of experience in developing and conducting social audits. Over this period, the methodology has evolved, from the early sentinel community surveillance and community-based service-delivery surveys, through reiterative survey and feedback cycles that propose service changes and monitor their effects, to randomised controlled trials - that measure the impact of interventions. The systematic and rigorous social audit methods provide solid evidence from communities that encourage health planners to plan with and for the communities. While the methodological approach has evolved and matured over the past quarter century, with social audits covering a wide range of topics in many countries, the underlying philosophy of CIET’s social audits has endured. CIET’s social audit approach was inspired by the Italian labour movement and its “alternativa operaia” [3] that involved workers and their knowledge in the conduct of occupational epidemiology. Applied in Nicaragua and Honduras in the context of monitoring the “child survival revolution” in the mid-1980s [4], this approach found common ground with the Latin American tradition of participatory action research, theoretically grounded in Freire’s philosophy of education. Social audits follow a dialogic approach to health-for-all, based on a two-way, symmetrical communication between professionals and