Today, however, we view our role more as a facilitator, to strengthen these organisations at grassroots level and to enable them not only to participate in the development processes but also to influence decisions that affects their lives and to advocate for their rights.

Our partners within this broad civil society movement or so called "apex organisations"; networks or federations of grassroots groups, are wide and varied and represent a cross section of rural and urban entities They include the village associations in Chad, the peasant unions in Burkina Faso, the network of traditional iddirs in Ethiopia, the district elected representatives in Timbuktu, the southern Sudanese refugees in Northern Uganda, the association of widows in Rwanda, the NGOs in southern Angola., the Haratines in Mauritania, the child student in Namibia.

We have also accumulated considerable experience of "capacity-building through partnership" with some major Southern NGOs and have stared to develop coaching and mentoring methodologies for capacity-building work with smaller ones. We have worked extensively with district or municipal departments of agriculture, health, education and have been involved in building government capacity at the provincial level, and combined advocacy with capacity building up to the national level. However, the vast majority of our capacity-building efforts focuses on people and groups who work at the 'grassroots' - that is, the local level, and generally referred to as community-based organisations.

What distinguishes these groups is the fact that in the main they are either socially, politically, economically or culturally excluded. Through our programmes of research, capacity building, advocacy, training, information and networking with other organisations, we have sought to facilitate the process of including these marginal groups into the fold of the broader civil society movement.

• We offered methodological and financial support to two local NGOs in Angola working exclusively with displaced people in so called ‘productive areas’.

• We stared to develop coaching and mentoring methodologies for capacity-building work with smaller SNGOs in Southern Angola and in Niassa Province, Mozambique.

• We worked extensively with district and municipal departments of agriculture, health, and education in Biharamulo, Karagwe and Mwanza in Tanzania and in the Gambos in Angola. 

• The value of our role in civil society in Niassa Province was recognised through our appointment to the executive body of a new partnership between civil society and Government to plan and co-ordinate development in the province.

• The network of Iddirs we support in Ethiopia succeeded in targeted local policy makers to bring about changes in urban Addis Ababa.

• We continued to inform communities about their rights and responsibilities within the framework of the decentralisation process in Timbuktu, where 80% of the population live below the poverty line and local organisations are ill equipped to defend the interests of local people. We promoted the ownership of the democratisation process by training elected local representatives to exercise their new functions.

• The core of our work in Juba was to build the capacity of local structures sufficiently to enable them to take on the activities of the programme. Organisations such as the village development committees (VDCs) were provided with training in planning, leadership skills and gender issues. The different committees took on different roles and the worked at becoming autonomous in each village.