|
|
|
Executive Director's
Report And yet, during the past year ACORD has moved a long way forwards: intentions have been converted into action. We are gaining that traction and we are making real progress. Having decided that in future we would organise our work around a limited number of themes and in a limited number of larger "area" programmes, programming staff throughout Africa and London have taken up the challenge and started to reorganise how they work and what we do. Diverse programme interventions have come together in larger country programmes; plans have been made to strengthen the research and analysis underlying those programmes and lessons have been drawn from other programmes to inform the work done throughout Africa. Sharing our knowledge has started to result in ripples of change affecting the rest of the organisation. For example, in Namibia our work in the schools of Aminuis in the Omaheke region has involved the use of a "social exclusion analysis" tool through which ACORD and the communities involved can understand the dynamics they are dealing with and, more importantly, through which different actors in the population can address their roles in protecting children’s rights. There have been real changes, not only in the situation of children but also in national policies affecting the treatment of children by teachers, parents and hostel workers. Although working in very different contexts, our programmes elsewhere in Africa and in the Secretariat in London itself, have found the use of this "social exclusion analysis" tool to be very powerful as a basis for analysis and planning. This horizontal learning, facilitated in part by the centre but not having originated from it, is a powerful sign of what ACORD can already do and what it can build on for the future: a tradition of research and programming innovation that can be developed further to lever change through learning across the geographical, linguistic and cultural barriers of the continent. Building our existing work around five core themes (conflict, gender, civil society, livelihoods and HIV&AIDS), each representing an area in which the rights of those on the margins of societies are all too frequently abused, enables us to be more focussed and therefore more effective. At the same time, it means acknowledging that there are some issues, such as medical services, which we will not, and cannot, address directly ourselves. Alliancing with other governmental and non-governmental organisations is our way of dealing with the fact that poverty and the denial of rights has many forms while our capacity to respond is limited by what we can do effectively. Fortunately alliancing has the added advantage that an alliance creates far stronger foundations for sustainable change than any one agency alone. The report that follows sets out our understanding of the rights issues that we face. It takes the framework of the emerging themes on the one hand and our existing administrative regions on the other to describe the events of the past year. In a year that has seen a deadly outbreak of Ebola in Northern Uganda, shelling in parts of Sudan, violence in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo and both flooding and drought in equal measure, ACORD has managed to touch the lives of at least half a million people in a wide variety of different ways as well as deal with all the internal changes happening to the agency. I hope you will find evidence of the traction that we are achieving in building an ever more effective and relevant organisation. Dave Waller |
