Building from the Inside Out

Arriving in September 2012 for a 10 month Uniterra II assignment I was excited to be once again returning to the continent of Africa. My first WUSC experience was under Uniterra I when I travelled with my wife and daughter to spend a year in Malawi in south central Africa in 2008 for 13 months. That experience was rewarding and transformative for all of us and my wife and I vowed that we would return to do further development work in Africa.

Once again both my wife and I had secured separate Uniterra placements, but this time our daughter, now in her third year of university did not travel with us. Janna and I were excited to each find placements in Accra, Ghana, Janna found a placement with Child Rights International while my placement was with the Ghana National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC).

GNECC had recently participated in two separate reviews of their capacity as an organisation and from that they had created a Step Change Plan in order to build themselves with a focus on long term sustainability. I was asked if I would be willing to tackle the actions planned for in their step change plan given my background in project management, and I agreed.

The first step needed was for me to get up to speed on who GNECC is, and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. GNECC was established in 1999 and is a network of education stakeholders with over 200 members including civil society organizations, professional groups, education and research institutions, and other individuals interested in promoting quality basic education. Their focus is basic education spanning from nursery to junior high school, with members countrywide. With over 10 years of research and advocacy experience, GNECC is a well-recognized and respected voice in the promotion of education for all in Ghana. Despite their successes though, there were still areas where GNECC had recognized that they could be strengthened in order to ensure their positive impact continues into the future. The three main areas to be tackled were GNECC’s “Vision, Mission and Strategy”, “Program Delivery and Impact” and “Resource Development” with on support and funding provided by STAR Ghana.

While there have been many, many activities taken to build GNECC some of the successes I have been involved in include strengthening the knowledge management skills of the coalition. This involved a two pronged approach, first training the staff in the importance of protecting, nurturing and backing up the knowledge they and the coalition creates. The second involved creating a cloud based storage system that can back up all the coalition’s documents and pictures online. This is a free system, and even if every computer was to be destroyed, GNECC will still be able to retrieve all its materials from any computer. This will increase GNECC’s effectiveness and better enable them  to tell their success stories to stakeholders, advocacy targets and current and potential donors. After presenting this online cloud storage system to our donor and sixteen other grant partners, such a buzz was created that GNECC will now be the trainer of trainers for other NGOs on how to set up their own cloud storage system.

In the above picture my colleague Fred Amo Otchere is introducing me at the beginning of our advocacy training.

To improve the coalition’s program delivery and impact I created a series of advocacy training materials and held a workshop over two half day sessions, that through interactive and collaborative sessions walked the participants through how to create their own advocacy plan on the issues that matter to them. The workshop was a huge success, and the participants left eager to use their new skills towards their own advocacy issues.

Lastly, in order to improve the financial resources of the coalition and to reduce dependence on donor funding I worked to bolster the collection of membership fees. These actions were in some ways simple, but from simple actions can come great results. The first step was to create an online registration system so that we could get an accurate database of who and how many members we had. From there we sold them on the value our members have enjoyed in being members of GNECC, (the carrot) with a reminder that under the Constitution that they created, without due payment, one cannot be a member (the stick). It is important for the coalition to broaden beyond donor funds, especially to pay for internal governance activities and to support goals and activities that matter to the membership and to become truly sustainable.

My experience with GNECC has been rich and rewarding. Being a volunteer cooperant is not without its challenges and frustrations, but with flexibility, a good attitude and perseverance real development work can be done. While I am returning to Canada, I will continue to promote the program from there, and who knows, maybe I will be back for Uniterra III.