When Youth Alive Foundation (YAF) relocated from Lagos to Akwa Ibom State, Uddy Okon, the Executive Director said it was like starting a new Niger Delta grown organization from the scratch. She had to recruit new staff who didn’t have enough skills to support projects. As she was weighing how to solve the problem, she learnt about the PIND Capacity Building for Local Empowerment (CAPABLE) institutional and technical training opportunity for regional non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like herself.
‘’So I sent two of my new staff to attend CAPABLE courses and they learned a lot’’ Uddy enthuses. ‘’They came back with more experience on how to run an NGO, especially in the area of financial management, grant making and using ICT’’.
For YAF, the grant making skill was key as they needed access funds to carry out their organizational mandate of promoting social and economic opportunities for youth and protecting their political rights. Then came the USAID-PIND grant advertisement to extend the Strengthening Advocacy and Civic Engagement (SACE) project to the Niger Delta. SACE would enhance the capacity of CSOs like YAF to influence public institutions whose functions are to serve citizens’ interests. Uddy applied for the grant and got it. ‘’I was lucky… I got the SACE grant because we did the CAPABLE grant making training before the SACE grant came’’ she asserts
YAF has been implementing the SACE project since 2014. Through the advocacy capacity building and alliances forged from the SACE project, YAF was able to get a Youth Empowerment bill through second reading in 2017.
‘’ And obviously, because of the successes we had registered on the SACE project in terms of having a bill in the Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly pass a second reading, the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) invited us to bid for a grant to support the anticorruption pillar of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and we got a five year grant for £2 million!’’
With a grant of £2 million, YAF could afford to expand her services from Akwa Ibom to more States as well offer more job opportunities. ‘’We are now working in Lagos, Abuja, Kano and Rivers. So that really expanded our organization and my staff strength moved from five to twenty something in a short while’’ says Uddy
YAF had bided for the grant with a consortium of other SACE project beneficiary NGO partners – Center for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) and Social Development Integrated Center (SDIC) – to implement the anticorruption work.
‘’So in Lagos and Rivers State, we are working with these two partners who are also of the SACE project and that really expanded our organization’s network.’’
Uddy ascribes the success of YAF to the foundation laid by PIND’s SACE and CAPABLE interventions.
‘’DFID did a due diligence before we got the grant. Because at this level, when you get these kind of grants, they expect that you have the systems and structures in place. Even now that we are implementing the grant, nobody is guiding us about how we need to operate because we have learned those things from CAPABLE and SACE. I thank God that we learned them. That has given us the structure to be able to implement such a grant’.
