Civil society organizations do amazing work against tremendous odds, and need support to enable them do even more, but it is hard to get support for your work if you cannot explain what you do to people who can actually help.
Because our NDLink team understands this, they reached out to Akvo to put together trainings for civil society organizations on NDLink to improve their reporting. MIND Africa Leadership Initiatives is a Port Harcourt, Rivers State-based organization working to empower children and youth from economically disadvantaged communities with skills. They found out about NDLink through a fellow organization based in Port Harcourt.
“Early last year, I met people from Focus Hub who work on supporting small businesses run by young people. He told me about NDLINK and I later met some of the staff at an event. That is how I joined NDLink.”
NDLink doesn’t only give organizations like MIND Africa visibility, it also provides them with opportunities to partake in development conversations with like-minded professionals and capacity building opportunities for their organization. MIND Africa was part of the NDLink Akvo training at PIND’s Economic Development Center in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. Like many organizations, though improving their reporting was not exactly a priority for MIND Africa at first.
“We didn’t think the need for training on reporting was significant,“ Olere Illuebey, Executive Director of MIND Africa, admits. “But we learned. Through the AKVO training, we learned how to report our impact, which is key when giving your reports. We thought we would need a camera crew, but we learned from the training how to take pictures and record video messages.”
Advocacy is becoming increasingly shaped by the internet and its increasing ubiquity through the world, and learning how to harness the internet to tell your own story, be it to communicate your successes or sharing information of your activities, is only going to get more important for organizations in the Niger Delta in the future.
“As a result of the training, we have attracted donors since last year, and we get good responses from them,” … “Because we put our reports online, so we don’t always have to introduce ourselves.”
Olere Illuebey,
Executive Director of MIND Africa Leadership Initiatives
