Project Detail

CAPACITY BUILDING FOR GRANTEES FOR EFFECTIVE SERVICE DELIVERY

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) Small Grants Programme (SGP) provides Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in developing countries with grants to enable them to tackle biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, international waters protection, reduction of the impact of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), and prevention of land degradation. This proposal therefore, seeks to address the capacity building objective of the programme and the knowledge needs of SGP grantees and other Civil Society Organizations.

The capacity building will be in the form of capacity building dialogue workshops which will provide a unique opportunity to enhance and strengthen capacities of NGOs/CBOs to engage in consultative processes, apply knowledge management to ensure information flows, monitor, evaluate and link environmental management impacts and trends to development issues. The workshop is also an efficient mechanism for learning, networking and sharing experiences among the SGP grantees while consolidating their capacity in influencing the policy development processes through participation in key events.

There will also be a networking and partnership building forum which will bring together financial funding institutions, government, donor agencies, corporate and private companies, community based organizations and non-governmental organizations to strengthen, explore and forge partnerships for resource mobilization to ensure sustainability of projects and impacts. Another workshop for sharing of lessons learnt will be conducted. It is expected that the workshop result in replication of best practices by grantees or encourage other organizations to apply to SGP. The dialogues, donor forum and the sharing of lessons learnt workshop will all be combined into a six day workshop to reduce costs of transporting participants and organizing different meetings.

In addition to the dialogue workshops a site visit to two (2) SGP projects will be organized. This will enable participants to learn best practices and see results on the ground. Lastly supporting material like brochures, poster and other promotional material will be developed to promote GEF SGP vision, objectives and understanding of its focal areas. The activities will be done in the South covering grantees and NGOs/CBOs in Ghanzi, Kgalagadi, Kweneng & Southern districts and North covering grantees and NGOs/CBOs in North East and Central districts.

The traditional and experiential approaches to learning will be combined to maximize the effectiveness of the capacity building initiatives.

Project Snapshot

Grantee:

BOTSWANA COUNCIL OF NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS

Country:

Botswana

Area Of Work:

CapDev

Operational Phase:

OP5 – Y4 (Jul 14 – Jun 15)

Grant Amount:

US$ 50,000.00

Co-Financing Cash:

US$ 6,000.00

Co-Financing in-Kind:

US$ 30,000.00

Project Number:

BOT/SGP/OP5/STAR/CD/15/11

Start Date:

7/2015

End Date:

12/2016

Status:

Satisfactorily Completed

Project Characteristics and Results

Inovative Financial Mechanisms

BOCONGO will deliver the five project objectives through the dialogue workshops. This is an innovative way to deliver the whole project package. In addition site visits will serve as a platform to document best practice video and at the same time monitor compliance of grantees to training provided from the dialogues. BOCONGO will work to ensure that donors sponsor own travel to present to GEF grantee workshops in the various sites, hence they will achieve mileage to create awareness at an already organized platform and will negotiate funding to at-least some of the GEF grantees with the savings made by the donor out of the already available workshop platforms.

Gender Focus

BOCONGO will ensure that there is an equitable representation of men and women led projects when inviting grantees to the workshops. The grantees will be assisted to develop a checklist and criteria to assess and screen projects including understanding how to mainstream gender and to develop gender guidelines to mainstream gender into the project cycle. They will also be helped to incorporate gender -based indicators into the report templates to track the status of gender mainstreaming in projects.

Capacity - Building Component

BOCONGO will organize three 5-day capacity development dialogue workshops covering areas such as Proposal writing; Project design; management and implementation; Monitoring and evaluation; Budgeting and financial management; Knowledge management; Governance and leadership; Resource mobilization; Networking and GEF 6 programming and the focal areas to develop an understanding of how local communities manage change combined with innovative approaches to capacity development. The three 4 day workshops will each be followed by a one day Networking, sharing donor forum for forging resource mobilization partnerships amongst NGOs as well as promote GEF to more potential grantees and most importantly to share funding information from donors and private sector to grantees. The networking session with donors will also be done as part of the 5 day capacity development dialogue workshop. This will expand on a continuum donor information and 1 day workshop on sharing experiences and networking donor forum will invite both existing and potential grantees to expand more on outreach. BOCONGO will also arrange 2 site visits in the north and south for learning of best practices and produce a 30 minutes video of the site visits for sharing with present and future grantees. The site visits will in addition monitor compliance of the grantees to the training received from the dialogue workshops. BOCONGO will develop supporting and visibility material for the project to help to attract new grantees and to publicize the achievements of the project.

Notable Community Participation

Dialogues on project planning and design, project implementation and monitoring and evaluation will be held during the dialogue workshops. The importance of involving community leadership in solving problems in the planning and design stage of projects will be emphasized, as this empowers communities to act and to participate in their own development issues. With regards to project implementation, grantees will be encouraged to solicit indigenous knowledge, best practices and experiences from local communities to promote the replication and scaling up of results for greater policy influence, as well as to promote sustainability and mobilize resources for community initiatives. For monitoring and evaluation, grantees will be assisted to develop project monitoring tools that enable them to monitor the compliance of the community and their practices on the environmental issues.

Policy Impact

During the dialogue workshops grantees will be introduced to lobbying, advocacy and networking so that they can be able to establish local consultative dialogues that can be responsible for influencing policy from local to national and global levels. Grantees will also discuss ways of creating partnerships with key government and non ?governmental authorities and policy makers and influential donors and allies to help ensure that support exists when they advocate for new policy formulation and implementation of existing policy. BOCONGO will facilitate a sharing of experience video and report with the Member of Parliament Sub Committee on Environment and Climate Change to enhance advocacy support from Members of Parliament to advocate for support of grantee programmes.

Emphasis on Sustainable Livelihoods

Grantees will be trained on the importance of highlighting how their projects sustainably enhance people?s well being and livelihoods during the proposals stage and when writing project reports so as to capture the interests of potential donors.

Replication of project activities

Several communication approaches will be considered to maximize the benefits, but for purposes of this project, participatory communication will be more ideal. This is a form of communication that facilitates active participation of the targeted audiences to freely discuss expectations. Direct engagement with the beneficiaries through dialogue workshops will provide for the opportunity to fully explain information on the project objectives and expected outcomes. Where needs be, the local media will also be used effectively to increase outreach. Some of the approaches that will be employed include printed materials like brochures and posters and the production of a 30 minutes best practice video to sensitise the communities about the project and its achievements and to share best practices with the aim of promoting replication of results and attracting new grantees. Botswana Television and other TV stations such as E-Botswana, and radio stations will be invited to cover the news events of the program.

Promoting Public Awareness of Global Environment

The promotional and visibility material produced will also capture information on the global environment. The material will be distributed to communities and NGO/CBO?s in the project areas and grantees will be encouraged to discuss global environment issues at every opportunity they get.

Project Results

BOCONGO successfully facilitated two 3 days capacity development workshops and knowledge fair for grantees in the South held in Kang and and grantees in the North held in Khama Rhino Sanctuary. Themed ?empowering civil society organisations for sustainable environment management?, the workshops attracted a diverse selection of participants and was attended by 140 participants comprised of programme grantees together with Civil Society Organisations and government officials from Ghanzi, Kgalagadi, Kweneng, Southern, South-East, Kgatleng, Central and North-East Districts.

The workshops covered areas such as: Proposal writing; Project design; management and implementation; Monitoring and evaluation; Budgeting and financial management; Knowledge management; Governance and leadership; Resource mobilization; Networking and GEF 6 programming and the Strategic focal areas. This was done in-order to sensitize and provide understanding of professional conduct in governing and managing trusts, managing projects, engaging stakeholders and communities, and how to come up with innovative approaches to capacity development, organizational and project sustenance and understanding the Strategic direction of the GEF.

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