By Archibong Jeremiah
Edem’s Children Foundation, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Cross River State has just concluded a one day Resource Mobilization and Project Management workshop for eleven personnel of selected NGO’s in Calabar.
The training which held at the Cooperate Headquarters of the NGO, No. 23 Etinyin Abasi Street, off Atamunu, Calabar South, was to build the capacity of participants to mobilize resources and funding from various sources, to improve trainee’s knowledge on the various components and tools for project development and implementation; and to orientate participants on basic facilitation skills.
The facilitator opined that running an NGO successfully depends largely on your strength of finance which is often hindered by not knowing how to size up funders.
According to him the first step to getting donor funding for NGO activities is to understand the funders by way of; conducting a preliminary research on potential donors while you are developing the proposal; when developing your proposal, keep in mind a potential donor’s specific interests and requirements.
He added that intending grantee must think about the reasons why the donor may be interested in your project; request and review any information that a donor has on its programs, priorities and requirements; as well as searching for and visiting the donor’s website.
He listed other essential questions that must be answered by the grantee while preparing the proposal to include: What are the donor’s priorities and organizational values? What kind of projects has the donor funded in the past? Where has the donor funded projects? Are there expenses that the donor will not fund? What are the proposal guidelines? When is the due date for proposals? What are the budget levels that the donor will fund? When are proposals reviewed? How many weeks before review does a proposal need to be submitted? Are there specific proposal formats that a specific funder prefers?
On the whole, participants were advised to always ensure that resource mobilization proposals clearly show strategic plan, organizational profile, audit reports and management policies.
Participants who spoke to our reporter expressed satisfaction with the training asserting that if there are more trainings as this, Cross River will develop internal capacity for her citizens to participate at a bigger scale in the development sector.
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