Action for Voice, Influence and Inclusive Development (AVID)
The Actions for Voice, Influence and Inclusive Development (AVID) project aims to improve access to social services and economic resources for underserved groups including Fulbes, Rural women, persons with disabilities, youth, informal sector workers (market women) and smallholder/peasant farmers. The project is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Its main strategies involve capacity building and grants, to enable organizations led by underserved groups and those working in solidarity to strengthen constituency building for effective demand of responsiveness of duty bearers to their salient issues.
AVID works with 21 grant partners, who are largely Community-Based Organizations and less formalized networks and associations. These grant partners are implementing projects in 52 districts across 14, out of the 16 regions of Ghana.
Related projects
Giving For Change
STAR-Ghana Foundation, under the Giving for change project funded by the Dutch ministry of foreign affairs has awarded grants to an amount of 468, 144. 50 Ghana cedis to five (5) organizations to implement projects on local giving.
The Giving for Change programme sets out a bold vision for transforming how “development is done” by focusing specifically on the recognition and importance of domestic resources in increasing local ownership, unlocking agency, and strengthening communities’ ability to claim entitlements from different actors, especially government.
The Giving for Change Project is implemented through an Alliance, and covers eight countries in Africa, Asia, and South America.
The project has a dual focus to promote civic and civil society space and strengthen communities’ ability to claim rights and entitlements from different actors, particularly government and domestic resources, through philanthropy, including local giving for transformational social change.
The Giving for Change Project is implemented in three main domains.
Domain two (2) of the project seeks to bring collective learning from the central domain to bear on working with key government, philanthropic and development stakeholders to press for an enabling environment for community philanthropy. The focus is to influence in-country state and other actors to support the development of community philanthropy by creating favourable conditions to promote the power of local philanthropic giving as a form and driver of social and systems change.
It is based on this backdrop that, the STAR-Ghana Foundation launched a closed call for proposals on projects around Local Philanthropy on the following thematic areas:
- Influence public awareness on domestic philanthropic giving (giving for social and systematic change instead of giving for direct needs) and increase trust in Civil Society Actors (CSAs) through advocacy and campaigns. The campaigns will target government, corporate and/or religious stakeholders, and should include dissemination through mainstream and new media.
- Conduct research on legal frameworks for domestic philanthropic giving, and the enabling environment for CSOs, including philanthropic organisations. The research is to serve as foundation for lobbying and advocacy.
- Influence conducive legislation on domestic philanthropic giving, with the support of the public, private and civil society actors including philanthropic support institutions. Advocacy on legislation should contribute to the formulation and review of laws, including the new Company’s Act, new Trustee Bill, Social Enterprise Policy and NGO Bill.
- Innovate giving platform or infrastructure to mobilize local resources or donations (money, skills, networks) as basis for new forms of partnerships for addressing community priorities.
- Amplify voice, claims and concerns of excluded groups (youth, women & girls, people living with disability) through local philanthropy and identifying additional entry points for engagement and action on gender equality and social inclusion.
After a competitive selection process, five (5) organizations have been awarded with grants to implement projects. These organizations include,
- Ghana Philanthropy Forum (GPF)
Title of Project: National Philanthropy Impact Dashboard.
The National Philanthropy Impact Dashboard (NPID) online Dashboard(portal). The portal will have the following modules: Reporting/Accountability/M&E, Sector Reports and Research 2. NGO Module 3. Community Funds Portal 4. Corporate Philanthropy Portal 5. Funding Portal This project will not only improve intelligence within the NGO space but also make activities it more trackable and quantifiable.
- Penplusbytes:
Title of Project: Yɛ Somu Bi
This project seeks to throw some light on domestic philanthropic giving by building an innovative research linked fund-raising and advocacy platform, which allows civil society to mount campaigns that appeal to different individuals and communities and causes them to react by giving off their time, talent or monetary resources. In this initial stage, the platform will be strong on user acceptance testing, focusing on the functionality of such a system in the Ghana online payment and transfers context and on its general usability among a largely semi-literate populace. Our aim is to ultimately empower individuals, donors and the private sector to collaborate and use collective action to achieve various goals on a platform that is a thoroughly tested prototype for future digital local fundraising platforms.
- Multimedia
Title of Project: The Classroom Project
It entails identifying critical uncompleted/dilapidated school infrastructure, mobilise resources through TV, radio and online to complete and furnish them for use. The objective is to promote self-help initiatives at the local community level with internal resources mobilisation.
- Songtaba: Faako: This is an initiative to create awareness on the importance of local giving and the great potentials and impact it can make in our communities by creating space to amplify the voices of very marginalized and excluded groups who needs the support of community members. The initiative would leverage on the experience and lessons from the innovation for localization pilot project which worked in four communities and initiated community actions on local given to support the alleged witches’ camps. The lesson is that communities have welcomed the initiative and ready to use similar approach to tackle their community challenges and priority needs. Songtaba plan to intensify sensitization on local philanthropy and local giving through community led actions, mainstream media, and new media to build communities understanding local giving and collectively establish structures to coordinate local giving activities within their communities.
- Community Development Alliance (CDA)
Title of Project: ‘Youth Giving for Change’ (YGC)
YGC is an innovative youth centered social change initiative that prioritizes inclusive participation of young people (male and female), persons with disabilities and other marginalized groups in local level resource mobilization, decision making and community development processes. The project draws on lessons learnt from previous interventions implemented by CDA across 10 selected communities in the Daffiema/Bussie/Issa District where Social Action Groups (SAGs) were established, empowered through training to champion community development initiatives through volunteerism, communal labour and fostering social accountability mechanisms on public service delivery
Partnerships Beyond Aid Programme
With funding from Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) of the United Kingdom (UK), STAR-Ghana Foundation is implementing Partnership beyond aid programm to consolidate work phases 1&2 on COVID-19 programme and strengthen civil society capacities to engage with government for inclusive access to public goods and services- health, education and social protection sectors in a pandemic and post-pandemic context
The programme focusses on:
- Inclusive access to quality public goods and services, including promoting government accountability and responsiveness around COVID-19 response and recovery particularly access to health and education services.
- Strengthening Ghana’s social protection system, particularly in mitigating and addressing the impacts of the pandemic on poor people and vulnerable persons.
- Strengthening coordinated civil society actions to improve government’s accountability and responsiveness to citizens at all levels of governance. This will particularly focus on delivery of quality and responsive services to citizens, including transparency and accountability for resource mobilisation, allocation and utilisation.
Localization for Innovation- NEAR NETWORK PROJECT
STAR Ghana Foundation with funding from the Global Fund for Community Foundations, under the NEAR Network project to pilot participatory grant making for scaling up community philanthropy and mobilization of local resources for addressing community and humanitarian issues. Overall, this project will pilot local approaches to addressing communities. Towards this, the intervention focuses on two key issues:
- Supporting the coordination of response to northern floods
- Mitigating socio-economic impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable and marginalized groups, including their livelihoods and dignity in access to essential services, such as food, health, and education.
This project proposes local philanthropy as a key strategy in responding to perennial floods in the north, and mitigating socio-economic impact of COVID-19, through collaborating on social protection for vulnerable and marginalized groups.
