General Report

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.