Visit to organisations supported by Foundation for Civil Society

Last Thursday I was given the opportunity to join Foundation staff into the field to visit some of the grantees (as they call the organisations receiving funds). The objective is to follow up on current project progress, and to discus possible challenges facing the implementation of the projects.
We went to villages around Kibaha (outside Dar es Salaam), and as the picture on the left shows, it is no an area entirely unknown to donors!

I was a good learning experience, which gave me a good insight into the capacity and types of activities being conducted.
Some of my observations were:
A. Some organisations are of a very grassroots nature, and therefore with a very limited capacity. It is a challenge how to assist these organisations to move form the basic level of organising one project, and to be a more formalised organisation.
B. Therefore presence of FCS staff to do facilitation and capacity building seems crucial. However, it is a giant task to cover all grantees.
C. Foundation seems to reach organisations which would otherwise find it difficult to assess funding.

It was a very good day in the field. We had time for reflection on a number of issues, such as the challenge of using LFA among inexperienced organisations, mobilising organisations to work with M&E, simplifying application formats and a lot more! The issues are not very different from our Danish debate, it seems!