capacity building

Funding:

ASAP identifies undeveloped community-based organizations and supplies long-term, scaled up funding initiatives supporting orphans and vulnerable children through nutrition and food gardens, education, psycho-social support and access to health and social services.

Management:

ASAP helps groups to establish and maintain their own field offices. Our staff works onsite consulting on programme development, good governance, resource allocation, training co-ordination and project management. Field officers offer technical assistance, trouble-shooting, conflict resolution and operational support.

M.A.G.S:

This programme provides community-based organizations with the tools they need to acquire and manage large-scale funding to establish sustainable organizations. Each phase increases in complexity, helping groups who have no administrative systems and little organizational infrastructure to grow at their own pace. In this way, informal groups of motivated volunteers transform into well-run organizations.

Monitoring & Evaluation:

Groups start by tracking basic numbers of orphans and vulnerable children and services provided, while ASAP mentors them on how to collect and maintain the data on their beneficiaries. As skills improve, ASAP introduces more complex assessment tools to track programme outcomes and evaluate more comprehensive indicators of child well-being.

Accounting:

Beginning where necessary, with pencil and paper, ASAP works with groups to become computer literate, capable of tracking funding and programmes through complex systems of accounting and data management. Incremental grants as well as regular audits help groups learn how to be 100% accountable.

Grant-writing:

ASAP provides leadership with grant-writing skills. They start with one-page applications and hand-written budgets and progress to more complex systems with activity schedules and logical frameworks for planning and implementation to track and document their achievements progress.

Strategic Planning:

The ASAP team conduct strategic planning meetings with group leaders and staff to identify opportunities and to assess time-lines in service delivery. ASAP informs government departments and key NGOs of programme development to align interventions with other initiatives. A key to the sustainability of organizations targeting increasing numbers of orphans and vulnerable children is that as the groups develop, government becomes a larger stakeholder.

Indigenous Women’s Conference and Learning Exchange:

A bi-annual conference enables members of the community- based organizations to learn from the expertise and experiences of their peers and colleagues. Workshops engage the women in exercises of leadership and good governance, while ASAP aligns and orients itself to the goals and ideas of each group. Because the community-based organizations are all developing Drop-in centers, these exchanges have been mutually beneficial in nurturing effective models of care.