Donors
Donors or Funding Partners play a significant role in partnering with public and civil society organizations in Africa to address some of the most pressing development challenges.
The support provided may be financial in nature or in kind through capacity strengthening initiatives or even direct implementation in service delivery areas. In providing support, however, donors also face challenges including:
- Being remote from where the services are delivered, there is inadequate assurance that the funding provided is actually being used to meet programme objectives.
- Lack of internal capacity to monitor and supervise the usage of funds especially in the smaller CSOs.
- While disbursements should be based on achievement of prior results, there is significant pressure on donors to spend budgets since underspending by grant recipients would be perceived as poor performance and could attract future reductions in funding.
- Challenges measuring and attributing results to the funding given especially in NGOs where projects are multi-funded.
- Finding NGOs with the capacity to effectively deliver projects and to absorb the funding received
Recognizing these realities, ACLAIM works with the Donors by:
- Conducting Pre-Grant Award Assessments or Organisational Capacity Assessments to give reasonable assurance that potential grant recipients have the required capacity. And where capacity is lacking, to build it;
- Conducting Outsourced Internal Audit Services on the grant recipients to provide reasonable assurance that risks to the achievement of programme objectives are well captured and addressed;
- Conducting Outsourced Monitoring and Evaluation Services on behalf of the donors to ensure that funds availed to grant recipients are used effectively and efficiently on relevant programmes to create sustainable impact; and
- Providing Outsourced Financial Management Services or Outsourced Procurement Services to the grant recipients to provide assurance of proper accountability for funds availed, among many others.
Please refer to the various ACLAIM Capabilities for the services offered to the Customer Segment and to ACLAIM Insights for some of our lessons and experiences.