Global Whole Being Fund 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 sustainability abilities, more visibility and coordination with partners, as well as improve its working environment and enable its personnel with working capacities and better livelihoods. 

The project went from January to December 2024, and implemented in Rwamwanja Refugee Settlement, Kamwenge district, Uganda. And it consisted of:

1. Refurbishing the existing working place, e.g. offices, Supplies, Laptops, and others

2. Modernizing its existing demonstration farming site, where it's expected the reach to shift from at least 505 to 3100

3. Contributing to financial motivation of volunteers and salaries of key leaders

4. Enabling AFID to compliance

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 utilization and cover partial daily office maintenance.

2.  It contributed to 6 leaders and volunteers’ salaries, paying their social security and other obligations such as taxes. 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 505 to 3100 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. Despite the increase rate of needs, AFID with its first flexible funding from Global Whole being fund through Cohere, has doubled its expected results. As the funding was oriented to improve the most important areas of the organizations, it has first of all organized coordination and networking activities with sister RLOs and other stakeholders to understand more the root-causes and excite integrated solutions. This reduced the cost, gave a deep understanding of the pressing problems and at the same time proposed significant solutions that was introduced and produced better results ever than before. More funding is therefore important to strengthen other areas and implement the insightful solutions on table now.

2. When a refugee-led organization implements a programme it is easy to gather a significant number of collaborators and partners, and this contributes to promote one another, learn from one another. It is a learning by doing through coordination activities and programs that contribute to share information and optimization of utilization of resources through sharing as an implementation approach.