Small AIDS organisations lost in funding maze

[Guest guest]

[it appears that there are interesting parallels between Southern

African NGO funding scenario and Indian AIDS NGO funding. Hence this

posting. Moderator]

SOUTHERN AFRICA: Small AIDS organisations lost in funding maze

JOHANNESBURG, 21 February (PLUSNEWS) - Millions of donor dollars

earmarked for HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment pour into

Africa every year. The lion's share is channelled through

governments and the well-known, international NGOs that are assumed

to have the capacity to manage large sums of money; but countless

smaller, home-grown initiatives, many of them started by local people

in response to an urgent need in their communities, battle for a

piece of the pie.

Flora Modiba has been the sole provider of home-based care to

HIV/AIDS patients in her neighbourhood of Tembisa, a Johannesburg

township, since 2000. A full-time professional nurse, she began by

visiting patients on her days off.

It took three years to secure a donation that allowed her to quit her

job and devote herself to the project full-time, but the donation was

a once-off and the funding she now receives is insufficient and, she

feels, overly prescriptive. " I think a lot of funders don't really

understand what we're doing, " she said.

Modiba's core business is palliative care because Tembisa's only

hospital cannot cater for its estimated 500,000 residents, and the 90

percent of patients suffering from AIDS-related illnesses must be

cared for at home, yet neither of her two funders will pay for pain

medication or the salaries of professional staff to administer them.

Instead, she relies mainly on volunteers whom she can pay only a

minimal monthly stipend to care for her organisation's 170 patients.

She estimates that she has applied for more than 50 grants, with

little success. " It's just a question of pressing the right buttons,

but we don't know which are those right buttons, " she said.

Lack of Capacity

Modiba is actually better off than many other community-based

organisations (CBOs) providing essential HIV/AIDS services, many of

which lack the skills or resources to access funding even for basic

supplies or stipends for their care-workers.

" I spent the whole of January writing proposals, " said

Rapuleng, who has fruitlessly been trying to raise funds for her

orphan-care project in South Africa's rural Limpopo Province for the

past two years.

She has eight years of experience in mobilising and managing funds

for a similar project in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, but

many others who start home-based and orphan-care projects have no

experience of running an organisation, let alone writing funding

proposals or reporting to donors.

" Most organisations around here start up and then they die because

they don't have the capacity to manage funding, " said Rapuleng.

Umbrella organisations like the AIDS Consortium provide their

affiliate organisations, mostly small CBOs, with training in resource

mobilisation and capacity-building.

" Oftentimes the programme output is there, but if you're a 'gogo'

[grandmother] who is caring for 60 orphans, and hasn't even had the

benefit of decent schooling, the sustainability opportunity is

minimal, " said Hunt, the AIDS Consortium's executive

director. " That gogo is going to need a lot of hand-holding to run an

organisation, to get funding, and to know how to use it. "

Rather than pulling the plug on organisations that fail to properly

manage or account for funding, donors are also starting to wake up to

the need to provide technical support to their grant recipients. The

European Union (EU), in partnership with the African Medical and

Research Foundation (AMREF), the Department of Health and the South

African Red Cross Society, is piloting a project aimed at building

the organisational capacity of the CBOs it funds in South Africa's

Limpopo Province.

Mapela Home-Based Care is one of 23 organisations in Makopane

District participating in the initiative. The founders, Kedibome

Sebelebele and Salome Sekhu, began providing home-based care to a

handful of patients in their community in 2002. Five years later they

had 117 patients on their books and 17 care-workers, but little idea

of how to manage an organisation that had grown according to need

rather than design.

With help from the Red Cross, they had successfully applied for

funding from the EU and the Department of Health but were struggling

to meet their reporting obligations. " Sometimes when we report to

funders, they say it's not the right format, " complained Sebelebele.

The first stage of the capacity building initiative consisted of a

series of workshops on financial management, governance,

administration and human resources, among others, where Sebelebele

and Sekhu were introduced to concepts like having a board of

directors, human resource policies and strategic plans.

In the second stage, a Red Cross 'mentor' visited regularly to

provide hands-on help in implementing those concepts. " We've got a

board now, but we need help defining roles, " Sekhu told her mentor

during a recent visit. Sebelebele, who now has the title of finance

officer, said she needed training in how to use the computer, paid

for by the EU, to do the organisation's accounting.

According to Jon Siburi, who is coordinating the Red Cross arm of the

project, lack of knowledge about basic accounting procedures was more

often to blame for CBOs losing their funding than corruption or

deliberate misspending. " Most of these organisations start small and

expand in terms of funding, but not in terms of capacity, " he

commented.

If the initiative proves successful, it is likely to be replicated in

other areas of the country.

Donor Unpredictability

But solving the funding puzzle does not end with a course in

financial management: donors have varying expectations, requirements

and funding cycles, and are not immune to their own administrative

glitches.

" We're trying to manage finances that are only there on paper, " said

Mogale, project manager of a home-based care project in

Limpopo Province. She was expecting a disbursement from their only

donor in October, but by the end of January it had still not arrived.

" We haven't been able to pay stipends [to our care-workers] this

month, " she said. " And it wasn't until last week that they told us

they'd lost our contract. "

Funding interruptions and delays pose a serious challenge to CBOs,

and a change in donor strategy can spell the end of a small

organisation.

The Botswana Network of AIDS Service Organisations (BONASO), another

umbrella organisation, used to disburse funds to its affiliates on

behalf of the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships (ACHAP), a

public-private partnership between the Botswana government, the Bill

& Melinda Gates Foundation, and pharmaceutical company Merck & Co.

Inc.

When ACHAP decided to direct its funding via local government

channels, BONASO and its affiliates were given just six months

notice. According to Motsatsing, BONASO's executive director,

this was not enough time to secure new donors: " Some projects that

were running well have completely collapsed as a result; only those

that had funding from other donors have survived. "

Donors who prescribe how their dollars are to be spent create another

headache for organisations trying to respond to needs as they arise.

Modiba recently used donor money earmarked for home-based care to buy

pain medication for terminally ill patients, who receive little more

than paracetamol from their local clinic. " I'm afraid they might not

renew my funding but, to me, using the money for medications is part

of patient care, " she said.

She understands the need for accountability - donor fears of funding

programmes that exist in name only are not unfounded - but believes

they should place more trust in CBO's local knowledge of gaps in

HIV/AIDS services and what is needed to address them.

Hunt noted that donors were often reluctant to fund operational costs,

such as salaries and administration, preferring to fund specific

programmes with identifiable outcomes.

" They love OVC [orphans and vulnerable children], " she said.

" Especially corporates - they don't want to look at the bigger

picture, they want to see the children being fed; they want to

say, 'there's our money and there's the response'. But the reality

is, if you want a powerful impact, you need to employ really good

staff, which means you need people to fund your core costs. "

Hunt, Modiba and Mogale all spoke of the necessity of developing

income-generating schemes that would lessen their dependence on

donors, but whether such schemes would be enough to sustain their

organisations is an open question.

Modiba believes that a donation of a shipping container, in which she

could set up a bakery, could go a long way towards funding her project

in Tembisa. For now, she operates out of a shack with no electricity

and, lacking a vehicle, her care-workers mostly reach their clients

on foot.

See also:

AFRICA: Donors call the shots in HIV/AIDS sector

http://www.plusnews.org/AIDSreport.asp?ReportID=6711

http://www.IRINnews.org/donors