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In
Acord
Newsletter
Issue 2: June 2001 Article 9: Funding in ACORD By CELIA CLARKE, Head of Funding, ACORD Since the last newsletter, it has been a busy time for funding deadlines. Many colleagues throughout ACORD have been involved in the race against time to submit funding applications and reports! March saw us racing to meet deadlines for the European Commission’s Human Rights budget line (Chris Dolan and Niki Kandirikirira developing one proposal and Bonaventure Wakana, the other) as well as the National Lottery (now re-named the Community Fund) with a proposal for the new Rwanda programme jointly developed by Chris Batchelor and Francois Mutanywara. The previous month had also seen us chasing another European Commission deadline – this time for Food Security. Colleagues from West Africa and the Horn worked tirelessly to refine programme documents in time to meet the deadlines. We also managed to submit proposals to DFID’s Civil Society Challenge Fund, which had the end of May as its deadline. A big `thank-you’ to Funding Officers Samy Adouani and Fran Smith who put in many extra hours to ensure that these deadlines were met. We have already had the project assessment by the National Lottery for the Rwanda programme, and we are very hopeful of receiving favourable decisions on some of these submissions. In early May, we completed our annual report on our 2000 programme activities for NOVIB, a sizeable piece of work that we have been able to adapt and send to other donors. Special recognition should go to Lavinia Thomas, who came to ACORD as a temp, and produced some wonderful graphics, as well as binding the whole report. Thanks to all those who submitted reports and statistics. Unfortunately, we did not receive information from all programmes, so the report was very much an overview of ACORD’s work, but it was fascinating to review just how much is going on at programme level, and what real changes are being brought about in people’s lives as a result of ACORD’s work. Two major pieces of good news were: the announcement by DFID that they would fund new HIV/AIDS work that Mary Garvey had developed in Botswana (worth £488,000 over two years), and the grant awarded to ACORD by PPP Healthcare, a charitable trust in the UK specialising in health and sanitation. They have agreed to fund ACORD’s water programme in Mbarara, and the project was featured in the trust’s press release. Other good news was the decision by ECHO (the European Commission Humanitarian Office) to award ACORD a Partnership Framework Agreement. This will allow ACORD to `fast-track’ funds for humanitarian operations, either for our own programmes or to carry out part of ECHO’s planned operations. Comic Relief has just announced its new grants programme, which retains its focus on the five main areas, but has added HIV/AIDS as a sixth area, and introduced two new grant-making programmes, one entitled `Innovations’ and the other, `Learning’. This latter category provides huge potential for ACORD to develop a programme in collaboration with other African organisations to learn lessons from past work. The European Commission’s budget line B7-6000, (Co-financing of operations in developing countries with NGOs) is supposed to publish its call for proposals for this year in early July. As yet, it is not clear whether they plan to prioritise specific countries or sectors, so we will have to be ready to adapt as soon as we get news. |
