STAR-Ghana Foundation and the West Africa Civil Society Institute look forward to hosting its first Webinar and learning series on Alternative Financing for CSOs. The virtual learning series, slated for the months of September, October and November, primarily focuses on introducing CSOs to alternative funding strategies through shared learning and experiences from community foundations and grantmakers in Africa.

 Already, SGF and WACSI have jointly held several capacity building for CSOs’ Communities of Practice (CoPs) in the Northern, Middle, and Southern zones on local resource mobilization strategies under the Giving for Change project. Civil society organizations (CSOs) in the Global South have been highly dependent on international donors for years. In Ghana for instance, foreign funding accounts for about 80- 90% of civil societies’ annual budget. However, in recent years, there has been a decline in donor funding generally and a shift in funding priorities to the Global South. This has affected many CSOs in the global south that depend solely on donor support to survive.   

Themed “Alternative Financing Model for Civil Society Organizations”, the webinar will be serialized into three models of development financing for the work of CSOs. These include Asset-

Based Community Development (ABCD), Social Enterprise and Social Impact Investment.

Each webinar session, will involve a guest speaker with knowledge about the model to introduce the model to participants. Also, a case study or an experience-sharing session will follow the guest speaker’s introduction to the model to facilitate learning from experience and storytelling on how the model has been adopted and used in real life. Participants of the sessions will as well be given opportunities to share additional comments and ask questions targeted at enriching the conversation.