Southern Africa Federation of the Disabled (SAFOD)

Flagship Program 1: SA-CIBIS

Southern Africa Capacity and Institutional Building Strategy (SA-CIBIS)

Under this program, the Southern Africa Federation of the Disabled (SAFOD) seeks to build the institutional operational capacities of its national affiliates in all the ten countries in the Southern Africa where it operates to ensure effective and sustainable national federations of Disabled Persons Organisations (DPOs). These DPOs should be able to significantly and sustainably promote and secure implementation of policies and legislation that promote human rights for persons with disabilities.

In terms of prioritization, this particular program has been ranked as a flagship program number one out of the total eight, owing to the following specific factors:

Firstly, this program is what actually defines the existence (mission) of SAFOD in the first place; i.e. coordinating, nurturing and strengthening its affiliates and other stakeholders in Southern Africa. SAFOD acknowledges that it cannot effectively coordinate its affiliates’ activities if it cannot help to strengthen their respective capacities in the first place.

Secondly, the prominence of the program is premised on the fact that over the years we have witnessed a trend of deteriorating capacities of NGOs and other non-profit organisations in the region and all over the world due mainly to the dwindling donor cash-flows affected by the general economic down-turn in the West. The trend has not spared DPOs or the disability sector. This has resulted in a number of our national affiliates of DPOs facing challenges in terms of leadership, governance and diminished general institutional capacity to manage various disability programs. In fact, not many national affiliates are actually implementing as many activities as compared to what the situation was just a decade ago.

However, in order to be more strategic and plausible in our approach capacity-building strategy will, ideally, start with the SAFOD Secretariat itself, as well as other critical structures of the organisations such as the Regional Executive Council (REC), and then trickle down to the affiliates. This so because any capacity-building initiative for SAFOD national affiliates to be coordinated by the Secretariat and/or REC cannot be sustainable if the latter remains weak. So part of the capacity-building strategy will also entail increasing and diversifying the SAFOD income through fundraising and quality partnerships and strengthening governance, administration (secretariat) and deepening accountability to deliver quality impactful programs.

SAFOD has, therefore, identified the following key actions and programmatic interventions in order to address the some of the above challenges:

  1. Facilitate Directors and Leadership Forums for NFDPOs.
  2. From time to time, commission independent capacity-building assessments of national affiliates and the entire SAFOD structures
  3. Undertake regular monitoring and evaluation visits of SAFOD to member affiliates (NFDPOs)
  4. Conduct independent mid-term and final evaluations of the SAFOD Strategic Plan to assess progress made towards the achievement of mission priorities and take remedial actions where necessary.
  5. Strengthen capacity; deepen engagement and collaboration with NFDPOs through training, knowledge sharing, awareness creation, lobbying, advocacy engagement and fundraising.
  6. Facilitate and build substantive linkages between development partners, national federations of Disabled Persons Organisations, the government and other actors in order to foster strong institutions in addressing disability related issues and to enhance sharing among the development actors.
  7. Recruit and increase the capacity of Regional Executive Committee (REC) members on governance, partnerships development, networking and fundraising.
  8. Review and strengthen management structures, board capacity to discharge governance; improve decision-making, programme implementation and accountability.
  9. Strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems and reinforce impact assessment.
  10. Review and implement organisational policies and systems.