My role in upscaling the revolving fund

By Tunde Ogunje, final year MDP student

 

My field placement is with Norsaac, a local NGO in Ghana operating from Tamale in the northern region of the country. I worked with the independent subsidiary of Norsaac called NiV managing all the sustainable livelihood and social enterprise projects of Norsaac. The team of four worked on four concepts/projects: the FIPA fund, the YEESS project and strategic plan for training centre.

Though I was involved in four projects, including facilitation in training focused on developing women social entrepreneurs, I will be dedicating this space to the project about upscaling an existing revolving fund. This is because I consider it to be the flagship for all the projects I worked on.  My task was to come up with how to grow a revolving fund that started with GHS 10,000 Ghana cedis but had grown to over 100,000 Ghana cedis. I developed a concept paper that the NiV team used to discuss the idea to create a pipeline for continuous and sustainable inflow into the fund from different sources by developing an investment-type social enterprise fund.

Features of the proposed concept:

For the supply side:

• Target size of the new fund is GHS 1,500,000), but with the option to further upscale.
• Contribution to the fund should be an investment with the potential to yield return to the contributors.
• Contribution is repayable but only after a minimum of 5 years.
• Return on contributions should be less than market return but with emphasis on the social impact outcome of the fund which are financial inclusion, poverty alleviation, and gender equality.

For the demand side:

• Increase the size of business capital that can be advanced to women entrepreneurs.
• Continue with the current model of group lending.
• Introduce social collateral security (e.g. Community accountability, use of many guarantors who are also investing in the fund, etc).
• Incorporate business management training.
• Create a network of business mentors to support beneficiaries in taking good business decisions.

Surplus fund: (difference between invested fund and credit advanced)

• Identify secured, low-risk and liquid investments (Not capital market securities). 
• Place surplus fund in income yielding investments returning minimum double of the highest return rate to investors. 
• Prioritize the main purpose of the fund by placing large portion of surplus fund in securities that can be quickly liquidated without penalty.

Strengthening the ecosystem for women entrepreneurship in Tamale, Ghana

By Tunde Ogunje

My field placement is with the Northern Sector Action on Awareness Center (NORSAAC), a local NGO in Ghana operating from Tamale in the northern region of the country. I worked with the independent subsidiary of Norsaac called Youth Social Services Organisation (NiV) managing all the sustainable livelihood and social enterprise projects of Norsaac, with other three staff of NiV in a team.

The Projects:

In all, there were three projects we started and which we are still working on. After the orientation and initial meetings with NiV team, we concluded that the short time I had would be well spent if we could focus on advising on the mechanism to upscale and existing revolving fund.  Then, opportunity came for us to respond to an expression of interest (EoI). So, we submitted a grant proposal for a project we called YEESS - Youth Entrepreneurship Education for Secondary Schools. Towards the tail end of the in-person part of the placement, the need arose for us to develop the framework for a strategic plan for the newly built training centre as a potential source of additional revenue for NiV.

In addition to these three main projects, I also facilitated some sessions in the training for potential young, female social entrepreneurs in a project that Norsaac and NiV are managing for Youth Challenge International (YCI), called HerStart. YCI is funded by Global Affairs Canada

My role:

Ukasha Mohammed is the Chief Executive Officer of NiV and works along side both Salim Mohammed and Harriet Anafo. Majorly, I worked more like an advisor or a consultant. While we were all working on these three projects as a team, I was leading the development of ideas, developing the concept papers, creating shared drive using google drive for team members to make real-time inputs, calling for meetings to brainstorm on the ideas and concepts, and making presentations where necessary.

Amui Djor Communal Housing Shared Grid-Tied Solar Project

By Elijah Osei-Yeboah, 1st year MDP student

The Communal Housing Project at Amui Djor. Photo: PD

In my first blog, I mentioned that I helped to implement development projects. This blog will focus on one of those projects ― the Amui Djor Communal Housing Shared Grid-Tied Solar Project. The housing component of the project was completed before I started my field placement. It was funded by foreign donors (governments of the UK, Sweden, and Norway; and Slums Dweller’s International). The housing component is a good model for pro-poor housing and I am happy I got to know this because there are not many of them.

The urban poor in Ghana often live in slums since they cannot afford decent accommodation and that was the case in this area prior to the project. They were under constant threats of eviction but PD, the leading implementing institution bought the land and set up a temporary accommodation for them. Then they built a 3 storey house for 31 households. Mortgages are very uncommon in Ghana and the few banks which provide them do so at astronomical interest rates. But the apartments were sold to the beneficiaries at below market rates and the payments were spread over 10 years. The money which will be recovered from the project will be used to scale it up.

Community Housing Project. Source: PD

Provision of solar energy was the other component and it was one of the major things I did during my placement. The solar energy was intended to be a secondary power source since power outages can be very frequent in Ghana. During my placement, power supply was fairly stable but in bad times, the power may be on for only 12 hours a day. Households lose a lot of frozen food and this makes life difficult particularly in this day and age where busy work schedules make frozen food very attractive. Businesses which are heavily dependent on electricity are forced to adopt one or more of these measures ‒ lay workers off, completely shut down, increase product or service prices ‒ in order to deal with the high production cost resulting from running expensive fuel-powered generators. For households, kids in school are unable to study or do their homework at night and diseases which are triggered by extremely hot temperatures increase in incidence. 

Amui Djor Solar Energy Project

My tasks included computing household energy consumption levels for managing energy consumption, creating accounts for managing power purchases, sensitizing the beneficiaries about the intended benefits of the project and its utilization, determining the conditions of works for the vendor, and setting up an office for the vendor. 

Tamale – Empowering a people … preserving heritage

By Barbara Gardner, 2nd year MDP student

Women attending 1st aid training - Nanton-Kurugu

Working with the officers and the various local communities around Tamale is proving to be quite rewarding. By attending training sessions and workshops it has become clearer that women, while respecting their heritage, are becoming more empowered through the training provided by RAINS. For example, health information training with women was critical in highlighting unsafe  practices of first aid care for their children.  

I also had the privilege of assisting with the preparation of a project proposal aimed at improving use of essential health services including comprehensive family planning.  If funding is granted, it will target women and girls of reproductive age as well as children up to 5 years.

 

Camp counselor, Barbara (far right)

While my primary focus was working at Regional Advisory Information and Network Systems (RAINS), I did find some time to volunteer at an annual Kids Camp in Tamale.  The children came from all over the Northern region of Tamale and for the first time they catered to Muslim as well as non-Muslim children who are housed at a lodge and chaperoned by adults over a five day period. The main aim of the camp is to foster togetherness despite religious beliefs. They are engaged in craft, dancing and sporting activities as well as participating in spiritual activities. It was encouraging to see children of all backgrounds interacting and forming bonds of friendships during the course of the week as well as learning from each other.

Through these interactions, I have learnt so much more than I ever could from reading books which depicts the happenings both culturally as well as sustainable development within Ghana. It also reaffirmed for me, that while my ancestors may have been from Africa, the Caribbean and Western experience, which has shaped my development, is very different from anything observed during this placement. 

 

A gathering of the more than 400 children

Akuaba from Accra, Ghana

By Adesuwa Ero, 2nd year MDP student

For the last three months, I worked as an intern for Peoples Dialogue on Human Settlements popularly referred to as PD in Accra, Ghana. It is a community-based Non-Governmental Organization working in alliance with Cities Alliance and the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor (GHAFUP) in providing and supporting improved livelihood initiatives for the urban slum dwellers. Through this internship, my goal was to synthesize urban development and communications. The opportunity to demonstrate through writing and visuals, the development efforts being achieved here, not just through the lens of development practitioners but also through the eyes of the beneficiaries and how these projects influence policy decisions. 

Although I am originally from West Africa, this was my first time visiting Ghana. Accra, the country’s capital and also where PD’s office is situated is a vibrant metropolitan city known as a commercial, manufacturing, and communications hub. 

 

My role as an intern at PD was to assist the programs’ officers with ongoing projects implementation and assist in coordinating community engagements. But, more importantly, to translate a lot of the office documentation ranging from community mapping and profiling, field visit reports, status reports into stories for the website, blogs, newsletters, project catalogs, press releases, validation reports, and other publications. 

Adesuwa at Kokrobite Beach

Through my time here, I have gained a deeper understanding of the complexities associated with development work especially in this part of the world. Taking into account the issues of accountability, professional work ethics, proper documentation, meaningful involvement of stakeholders/ beneficiaries, developing comprehensive project plans, monitoring, and evaluation. In addition, assessing the success trajectory of past projects.

Another interesting observation was getting to understand the cultural dynamics within which the society operate knowing that it tends to have a significant effect on the outcome of development efforts. 

The only thing I found challenging in my time here was the language barrier in communicating with community members and government officials. However, this challenge was not peculiar to foreigners alone but also common within the city enclave which constitutes a wide array of cultural groups with distinct languages. This meant that for every community engagement we had, a minimum of three languages translator’s asides from English had to be present in order to ensure effective and more meaningful engagements.

In a nutshell, the internship provided me the opportunity to work closely on a wide spectrum of development projects to include waste management, water, and sanitation, improved housing and eviction issues, city-wide profiling and mapping, alternative energy, and the Know Your City (KYC) Campaign. Also, I have gained increased capacity in stakeholder mobilization, community engagement, tension management, identifying meaningful communication techniques best suited for grassroots participation. 

The last but not the least, I had the opportunity to learn and work with a group of community youth along side delegates from Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) in first building capacity and producing a video documentary on the activities of GHAFUP to be shown at the upcoming UN-Habitat 3 Conference in October.

Meet The Women Who Are Toiling Hard To Secure The Future Of Their Children And Community

By Nana Araba Asaam, 1st year MDP student

“No matter how you measure it, women and children bear the brunt of poverty. But it’s also clear that women are our greatest hope for ending it. I have long believed that if you change the life of a girl or woman, you don’t just change that individual, you change her family and then her community.” Dr. Helene Gayle, President/CEO of Care USA.

Giving out cash to women farmers at Zoosali for purchasing certified seeds

I have come back to my roots but this time to a different region and with a different purpose: to help create a world in which women are empowered to secure the future of their children and community. My first field placement is with the Regional Advisory Information and Network Systems (RAINS) in the Northern Region of Ghana. I have the opportunity to be working on the Integrated Community Empowerment (INCOME) program, funded by Canadian Feed the Children (CFTC), whose intended outcome is that children in vibrant, sustainable communities in northern Ghana have foundations to build a prosperous future. 

Since it is generally believed that women are the primary caregivers of children, the program to a large extent targets women in the rural communities to effectively address issues confronting children. The program directly supports over 1,000 school children by providing tuition fees, uniforms, learning materials and interventions to improve the learning environment. In recognition of their primary caregiver role, the program also supports women’s livelihood activities, such as crop and animal farming, and beekeeping. It also provides training for Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLA) among the women to boost their household income status and financial decision making capacity. 

VSLA group at Sang after distribution of share saving and profit

 The above-mentioned activities are intended to increase food security and the economic status of the women as well as enhance their participation in decision making processes, thereby putting them in a better standing to protect their children. This also ensures that women are better able to generate and use their earnings to feed their families, send their children to school and keep them there.

I have been incredibly impressed by the hard work done by most women in the Northern Region despite the many challenges they face. Besides issues of cultural and male dominance and gender inequality, the women labor under numerous daily tasks such as walking long distances to farm, collect firewood, cook, clean, get water, care for children and more. Whereas, the men only weed farm lands seasonally, and most of the days sit under trees to play board games with friends. It has become quite obvious to me that there is a long way to go toward achieving equal task distribution and gender equality in the rural communities of the Northern Region. It is however comforting to realize that the INCOME program among other intervention programs undertaken by RAINS are steps in the right direction. My hope is that with time and the ongoing economic empowerment of women, a way will be found for more equal distribution of labour at household and community levels.

Beneficiary of INCOME program proudly showing off her farm land

I have spent a lot of time in the Zoosali, Bidima, Kpachilo and Sang rural communities and walked many miles to visit farm lands and beehives of the women farmers. I must admit that I am highly impressed and inspired by their strength, selflessness, continuous persistence, hard work and resilience to lay a better foundation for the future of their children and communities. 

I am happy and grateful to be contributing to this program, learning from the RAINS team and my women friends whom I have formed beautiful relationships with. I pray and hope for the day when the children will thrive and be free from poverty and my friends will be totally empowered.