Through Cohere, AFID
was supported by Global Whole-being Fund to enhance its financial and
operational capabilities. The fund's aim is to contribute to AFID's visibility
and coordination with partners, as well as improve its working environment and
implementing teams' livelihoods.
The project is slated
from January to December 2024, and is being implemented in Rwamwanja Refugee
Settlement, Kamwenge district, Uganda.
The fund serves to:
1. Refurbish the
existing working place, e.g. offices, Supplies, Laptops, and others
2. Modernize its
existing demonstration farming site, where it's expected the reach to shift
from at least 530 to 3000
3. Contribution to
financial motivation of volunteers and salaries of key leaders
4. Comply with
government taxes
The fund served for the following:
1. It refurbished AFID’s offices. The
refurbishment consisted of equipping AFID offices with ceiling, new well
air-conditioned veranda, painting, light indoors and outdoors, 4 office chairs
and tables, 4 laptops for office utilisation and cover partial daily office
maintenance.
2. It contributed to 6 leaders and volunteers’
salaries, paying their social security and government obligations such as taxes
(pay as you earn and local tax). The fund helped to develop required operation
and managerial manuals for the organisation’s growth and development.
3. It contributed to modernize the demonstration
farming. The site established in 2021 was a result of community engagement that
was struggling recently due to shortage of means of maintenance and innovation.
This fund served to acquire an up-to-date irrigation kit that serves to
irrigate the established gardens during the drought. The irrigation kit has
strongly contributed to enhance the productivity. The site has increased the
users from 520 to 3400 smallholder farmers, minor researchers and
community-based initiative members to learn from innovations and changes.
4. Coordination meetings with stakeholders
and community leaders were held to enhance partnerships and collaboration. AFID
took part in diverse coordination activities at refugee settlement, district,
region and national levels.
5. Benchmarking visits were conducted to more
advanced organizations, agencies and sister refugee-led
organizations to learn and enhance partnerships and networking
efforts. From these significant visits, and with continuous mentorship from
Cohere, AFID and three sister refugee-led organizations established a
consortium under Livelihood sector called “Refugees’ enhanced
livelihood interventions for veridical empowerment initiative”. The main
mission of its program is for communities to become self-reliant and proactive
through tailored and sustainable local economic development, enhanced service
delivery and green growth, all of which contributes to improve the livelihoods
of forcedly displaced persons and other vulnerable communities.
1. Community based
organizations (CB0s) are likely to be more productive with flexible fundings.
Their presence in the communities that makes them to be responsive than
reactive to the needs of their communities requires some flexibility in
financial resources. Also, because this helps the grantee or subgrantee to
build strong equitable partnerships with the communities and other key
stakeholders, learn from THEM and be more responsive than reactive. The Global
whole-being funded programme is 90% success because of its approach: first
build the recipient's capacity before result-oriented projects.
2. Secondly, the
flexible funding contributes to build or strengthen the team's capacity in
different key sectors.