Transcript: a webinar for UK Aid Direct grant holders
An introduction to value for money, beneficiary feedback, and partnerships
Amy:
Hello everyone. If you can hear me, please could you type in the chat box? ... okay. I'm going to assume that everyone can hear me.
Hello everyone. My name is Amy Jackson, I'm a technical specialist here at MannionDaniels. Thank you all for joining us today for this webinar. The webinar is on an introduction for value for money, beneficiary feedback and partnerships.
So, if you just go to the next slide, the structure of today, first of all, we'll just do a quick context of why we are having this webinar and why these subjects have been chosen.
We have then got our grant holder, Afrikids, here who will talk to us about partnerships and then we'll discuss value for money and then beneficiary feedback mechanisms. We have a transcriber today. Now this is the first time we have had a transcriber. Please bear with us on this. We'll be having a break, a 5-minute break after 45 minutes to allow the transcriber a slight rest before we move on.
If you have any questions, please type them in the chat box. We will have a question and answer session after each section. So yes, please do take notes of any questions.
So, if you just go to the next slide, the reason we are having this webinar today is because we asked you all to conduct an Organisational Capacity Assessment. You did this back in September, so it must feel like a long time ago now. Just to remind you of what the Organisational Capacity Assessment was for. It was a set of questions that helps you to assess your weaknesses and strengths in the organisation and the intention of that is to improve your organisational effectiveness as you work through your projects that are funded through UK Aid Direct. For us, organisational effectiveness, it is about meeting your objectives. So, it's those outputs, outcomes, and impact statements that we have been working with you on over the pre-contracting phase and as you now move to starting up your projects.
We hope that through your OCAs that you are able to facilitate conversations looking at what you had and where maybe there were gaps, in order to start to think about what needed to be developed, ready for your project to start and as you start moving on with your implementing partners into working on your projects.
I hope that you found the first OCA useful. I know it was a bit of a weird one in that you had not started your projects so some of the questions didn't feel relevant, but yes. So yes.
I think, yes, hopefully you found that useful. So, if you just move on to the next slide.
So out of the 38 grant holders that we have, 32 completed the assessment fully; and by fully I meant that they either filled in every single question or there was clearly thought that had gone into the questions. I think there was one grant holder who had scored themselves as top, so 4 for everything, and so I haven't included that in the 32 who completed the assessment fully.
The OCA was really useful from our side because it highlighted where you, as grant holders, have got real strengths and where we should be learning lessons from you and also where there are weaknesses that we can support you with.
I think one the thing we found particularly useful is it showed where grant holders were particularly strong in critical thinking, so reflecting on their practice, and then making changes from that. So, I think from our side, we found it a really useful process and keen to do so going forward.
In terms of the findings, we aggregated all of the scores that you provided and looked at them across the board. We found that capacity was highest in financial management and lowest in governance. So, if you remember there were five domains and so these were two of them.
So, if you move on to the next slide. This is just a diagram to show you on aggregate what the scores were. So, the hope is over time we will see this pentagon expanding. We should be seeing 3s at the next one and hopefully 4s by the end.
This will be done in a combination as you become more familiar with the project, and also as we hopefully support you through guidance documents, through webinars and through daytoday support with your performance and risk managers and the rest of the MannionDaniels and consortium team.
Just showing it in a slightly different way if you move on to the next slide, again this just shows you where grant holders were strongest on average and where they were weakest. It's interesting just to see, yes, the areas that we can improve on. Again, I just want to stress: I know some of these questions weren't relevant because you hadn't started your projects, so we should see quite a big change when we next conduct the OCA.
So then if you go on to the next slide; this is a table of all the subdomains we looked at and you can see the average score for those, the point why we are running this webinar today. The webinar is being run on partnership arrangements and value for money and beneficiary feedback mechanisms on the basis that these are the three subdomains that scored the lowest. This will be a mixture of just not having started the project yet, but also we wanted to give you the best chance by having this webinar now as you are starting your projects to make sure you have the information you need to be improving on these areas as you start your project. I think, from our side, we see these areas as really crucial to the success of projects.
So, we are reallylooking forward to discussing this more with you, and particularly hearing from AfriKids on partnerships.
So, I think we've only got AfriKids for half an hour. They are very busy. So, I am going to pass over to them and they are going to kick off on partnerships. ...
Ama: Hi. I'm Ama. I am Head of Grants at AfriKids and I am joined by David who is our Director of Programmes and works for AfriKids Ghana, our partner. We have got him in the UK for a week and a half. I thought it would be good if he could share the lessons we've learnt in terms of partnership in country.
A little bit about AfriKids. We are a child rights organisation. We work in northern Ghana, so the three northern regions, to alleviate child suffering and poverty. Our approach is simple. We listen to local people and empower them to make sustainable changes themselves.
We always build the capacity and resources of the local people, organisations and initiatives, so they will be able to continue our efforts independently and sustainably. Our team in Ghana, the UK team is a team of 7. Our purpose is really to fundraise for AfriKids Ghana's activities, and then AfriKids Ghana essentially are the programmes department and we have 117 staff in northern Ghana. We do not have a head office in the capital. All of our operations are based in Bolgatanga in the upper region of Ghana.
We have three primary thematic areas: Education, child protection and healthcare, and the project that we receive funding from UK Aid Direct for is for sexual health and reproduction, SHR project, and that cuts across those three thematic areas for us.
So, as I've already said, oh, change the slide, please. We work in northern Ghana, where about 63 per cent of the population live in poverty. We are in quite a unique position in that we, AfriKids UK work with one partner and that is AfriKids Ghana. AfriKids Ghana have some other partnerships, but we are their primary funders. So collectively we fulfill fundraising and programmes and activities together, but we registered as separate organisations, so AfriKids registered as a charity in 2002 and AfriKids Ghana was as an NGO in 2005 in Ghana.
The team are all local so they really do have very a strong detailed understanding of the issues that people in communities we work in face. They have grown up there. They live there. They work there and they are still really connected to the work that they do. So, like I say, we don't have a head office in Accra, the capital, so it puts us in a slightly unique position in terms of the way that we work. It means we are really connected with loads of partners and stakeholders on the ground.
Next slide, please.So, in terms of how we structure the organisations. We have a Memorandum of Understanding between AfriKids UK and AfriKids Ghana which sets out our roles and responsibilities. Essentially for us, like I said, that means AfriKids UK fulfil fundraising objectives and we support Ghana in capacity building, and AfriKids Ghana work to deliver the projects. They manage them. They implement them. They design them. They do all of that stuff.
In order to make sure that we can report back to our donors, like UK Aid Direct, AfriKids Ghana provide a monthly project report, both narrative and financial, and we triangulate that information and put that into our reports and make sure that we can account for where our money is being spent.
AfriKids UK and AfriKids Ghana both undertake annual audits. So, partnershipswork in country. Next slide, please.
So, we work alone and we really have three primary groups that we work with when it comes to partnerships. So, it's community members and groups and government stakeholders and powerholders and international NGOs and other private sector organisations in the communities that we work in.
AfriKids Ghana are really able to attract and maintain these partnerships because they are so firmly rooted in the environment that they work in. They have built a strong reputation in the communities that they work in and they've become, AfriKids Ghana have become a household name in the areas that they work in.
Where necessary, if we need to, we will put in place MoUs with our government stakeholders or the NGOs that we are working with, really depending on what the work is that we are doing.
So,I am going to hand over to David to talk a little bit about our community members groups and how we work in partnership with them.
David:
Hi everybody. It's a privilege to be sharing with you some of the experience ofAfrikids Ghana in terms of our relationship with our partners.
For us, we recognise the local community as a very key stakeholder in all the things that we do. We have done it in most of subsaharan African countries. The local community is usually very critical in terms of programming, in the sense that if we want to sustain all the interventions that we start, you can only have them as passive observers of project implementation. For that matter, whatever we do as AfriKids the community issues are from planning interventions, to implementation, to monitoring and evaluation of our work.
What we do to enable that is in development to build the capacities in the manner that we are able to appreciate their situation and to understand the fact that they are not living in the most desirable conditions and will want to do things personally so they get out of the situation in which they find themselves.
We deal with the communities we work with and we have been able to map out certain key community mandates that we work mostly with. The traditional authorities is really critical in Ghana, for instance there was so much authority, there is so much power, when they buy into your concept it is easy for them to get the community members to also buy into it, and so we work very closely with the traditional authorities, the chiefs, the (inaudible) and the key opinion leaders, to build the capacity of these people so they understand government policies very well and they are able to hold government to account.
We also identify some key structures, especially work in schools. We have the school management community which is responsible for overseeing the daytoday running of schools. Usually what happens is that because people do not want to be held to account, especially they are officials, they want to build the capacities of these key structures. So what we have decided to do is to take up the responsibility of building their capacity so they know what they are supposed to do and in terms of their roles, they know what, teachers, for instance, the nurses in terms of the services that they ought to be delivering, they understand all of this and are able to hold these service providers to account.
In Ghana we are in a situation where the government is doing very well by ensuring the schools are dotted across the local communities. Health centres are provided. Nurses and teachers are sent out there, but when it comes to certain delivery it is a bit of problem because the commission is quite weak. That is why we think that to be able to get these service providers to deliver the right services it is important that the local community services has a check to be able to bring them, a checkpoint where they are delivering to expectation and so we build the capacity of local people so they know how to do this in a nonconfrontational manner. They do this from a development perspective. They are really supportive. In circumstances where teachers require accommodation the community is willing to provide accommodation to house teachers and sometimes to clean hospitals, to build bridges and to build makeshift classrooms in circumstances where we have children overcrowding so that we are able to complement the work of government.
So, these are some of the things that we do. But this does not come easily. It needs to come with a lot of capacity building for them. We need to organise them and empower them with the right planning tools in order to teach them how to do their work and evaluate it so that they are able to make progress.
Ama:
So, in terms of, just continuing from what David is saying, we thought we would share some of the successes. For example, we deal with an issue in the Upper East region of Ghana called the spirit child phenomenon, it leads to infanticide, abuse and neglect of children, particularly children with disabilities because they are not seen to be human. We have been working to address this issue for a very long time since we first started working there in 1998. In that time, because the community are so engaged in our work and we have their buyin and support, the other communities have watched how we have dealt with the spirit child phenomenon in Kassena-Nankanaand we have been invited into new districts to come and address the issue there as well.
I think it's really important to say that because actually I think Ghana have built the respect and the trust of the communities and the chiefs and the traditional leaders to the extent that they now invite us into their communities to come and address issues that they are finding challenging.
But then also I wanted to share another story with you. So, Simon in the picture on the slide is one of our community education campaigners for our education products. He is a parent and he has been really actively engaged in the work that we are doing. He's been really actively engaged in the education project we have been doing and he goes around his community and educates parents on why it is really important that they send their children to school at the right age, enrol them at the right time and to ensure that they prioritise their child's academic needs. So, school uniform, stationary, et cetera, and supporting those kinds of things.
Simon had worked in the community where the schools do not enrol you beyond September. So, if you have a child that didn't enrol in September that needs to enrol later on in the year they would have to wait until the beginning of the next academic year to be able to enrol.
Simon changed that in the schools that he works in. They now enrol children throughout the year and he has been integral to making that change happening, but that is because also of the capacity building that AfriKids Ghana have been doing with he and his colleagues and parents and community members. So they are able to really effect change once we've given them the skills and the information and knowledge they need, and then they go and lobby the government and their local Ghanaian education services or whoever it is to get what they need.
There are also some challenges. It is difficult to manage expectations of the communities that we work with. Often, you know, we can't necessarily meet the demands of everybody, particularly we start to look at things like education for girls and girls that might need really direct support, fees paying and items like uniforms to be able to stay in school, and of course children with disabilities. So, it's really important that we, at the beginning of the project, we ensure that we can signpost our community members and parents to relevant services that can support them and then also manage the expectation so that they get what they need from us.
Then we need to be able to respond to the changing needs, because actually, you know, our projects, when they are happening, sometimes maybe the ideas or the intentions we had at the beginning are not the way we need to stay in. We might need to make changes or tweaks and it is being able to respond flexibly to the needs of the communities that we work in.