Not for Profits
Not for Profits have a key role in addressing various development and humanitarian needs across sectors in Africa. The Not for Profits or NGOs, however – both Local and International – continue to operate in an environment with fast-paced changes that they must keep up with.
There is financial uncertainty arising from changing donor priorities challenges planning efforts, given the high donor dependence by most NGOs. This is coupled with the task posed to NGOs to cover ‘core / overhead costs’ as many donors only focus on ‘direct project costs.’ The NGO competition for financing has led to greater accountability calls from various – sometimes conflicting – stakeholders, to demonstrate their effectiveness and efficiency. There is increasing demand for Not for Profits to expand from single to multiple holistic interventions that address wider interrelated community concerns. The increased direct funding of Local NGOs that are considered to have a better understanding of the needs of the communities they operate in, comes with opportunities and threats to both Local and International NGOs.
Cognizant of these realities, ACLAIM works with the Not for Profits by:
- Guiding them in the development of foresighted Strategic Plans to enable a smoother sail in the uncertain waters. This is followed by the development of creative Financing Strategies to ensure financial sustainability.
- Developing and implementing thorough Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning systems that capture data necessary for the NGO to demonstrate the impact on beneficiaries and to share learnings for replication.
- Building robust Financial Management Systems to enable the organisations be accountable to their stakeholders. This includes conducting the popular Finance for Non-Finance Managers’ Training for NGO Executives that find themselves with immense financial oversight responsibilities, but without the relevant financial management background.
- Board Advisory including Training for grassroot-level NGOs or CBOs using simplified governance models to enable them provide oversight, insight and foresight to the organisations they lead, or even providing Outsourced Board Services (Rent A Board) to them.
- Providing Outsourced Financial Management or Outsourced Human Resource Management or Outsourced Procurement Services to allow the NGOs focus on their core of designing and implementing programmes.
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.