Capacity Building
Background Information
The program seeks to increase the percentage of young children affected by HIV & AIDS who achieve age-appropriate milestones physically, socially, emotionally, and cognitively. In order to achieve this goal, Firelight supports CBOs through its Lead Partners in Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia in working to:
- Improve the physical, social emotional development of children 0 – 3.
- Improve school readiness for children 4 – 5.
- Improve early childhood development knowledge and skills among parents and caregivers of young children affected by AIDS.
Examples of programs of interest include facilitating or providing high quality ECD center services, including play and learning, facilitating access to basic health services, including well-timed vaccinations, preferably integrated into the ECD center services for ease of access, enhancing skills, knowledge and practices, of parents on childhood development, including nutrition, health, play and learning, early childhood development integrated within PMTCT and HBC programs, and creating a safe and supportive home and community environment.
Objectives
- Improved ECD services and care practices for children aged 0 - 6 years in 6 FLF partners which result in better Nutrition, Early Learning / Stimulation, Protection, Health care and Protection.
- Increased ECD service linkage for children aged 0 – 6 years among FLF partners’ served communities which result in better children’s access to Nutrition, Early Learning / Stimulation, Protection, Health care and Protection services.
Project Values
- CBOs are able to grow as organizations to better serve the community by improving their knowledge and skills collectively as a group of organizations and individually as organizations that have individual needs in both programming and organization development.
- CBOs are better placed to address the critical community issues due to them being able to operate with cultural and contextually sensitivity.
Goals
- Programming Goal: To strengthen the 10 FLF Partners’ skills and knowledge in provision of Integrated ECD Services through linking with other service providers and stakeholders by 2019.
- Organizational Development Goal: To increase 10 FLF Partners’ capacity to mobilize resources, plan and measure impact of ECD services provided in community they serve by 2019.
Achievements
- Increased capacity of CBOs program staff on implementing and monitoring the ECD programs. Their knowledge and skills have improved through trainings, mentoring and coaching, meetings and learning cycles.
- The ability of organizations to manage their finances has increased greatly; the Finance officers have improved their bank reconciliations, cash books and financial reports.
- Improved Organizational Development (OD) specifically on identity, structure and function to facilitate effective programming.
- Increased partners understanding of Early Childhood Development (ECD) with specific focus on understanding and utilizing opportunities in their contexts including enablers, barriers and the systems thinking.
- Improved knowledge on Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning which has enabled partners to provide results-based reports to Firelight.
- Partners have improved their Safeguarding and Child protection systems, including policies, guidelines, documentation and reporting.
Lessons Learnt
- CBOs who emerge from Self Help groups take time to internalize a new identity, agency, structure and a new function as they expand to serve more people outside their group. Their vision and mission has to change as well to accommodate the new vision (SEFFO, MWDO and UMOJA have changed names of their organizations to embrace their vision and mission after realizing that there have been changes in their identity, agency, structure and the new functions, organizations are not static and the needs in communities and children need new strategies).
- CBOs who work within the community serve and perform better than those who have to travel to reach the communities, there is high engagement and participation of the community members as they can be easily mobilized, they can be easily influenced by their own leaders and it is easy for them to monitor and evaluate the activities with minimum costs.
- Working with emerging CBOs has to set a year or two for OD capacity building before they engage in programming, the reason being that, an organization which is strong in systems is well placed to do better programs than those who do the two concurrently (they may have high staff retention, have fundraising capacity, good relationships, credibility etc.) AMANI Girls has been able to retain its staff because they have the capacity to mobilize resources from other donors as well as sharing of the ECD program staff. (SEFFO has initiated activities to help them sustain the ECD Center services, APDM has started to demonstrate how micro finance activities can support an ECD Center services and caregiver retention)
Challenges/ Constraints
- Inadequate resources among the CBOs to implement all the planned activities, some have only one donor (Firelight)
- High staff turn-over, especially at the Child Care Centres.