Kelompok Masyarakat Pengelola Sumberdaya Alam, the Community Natural Resource Managers Program (in the national Indonesian language, the acronym spells the name of a jade-like magic stone), focuses on achieving sustainable expansion in the use of biological resource management and conservation "best practices" by rural communities in Indonesia (Read, T., L. Cortesi, et al., forthcoming). KEMALA seeks to link individuals and organizations concerned with traditional community-based natural resource management across Indonesia to build coalitions that are well informed, technically competent, creative, and politically active. KEMALA supports the strengthening of local and national NGOs that can contribute to improved biological resource management and conservation and nurtures the growth of decentralized democratic structures within which groups can participate in decision making now and in the future. KEMALA partners are NGOs and NGO networks with effective track records related to these attributes and objectives. Partners get grants supporting ongoing fieldwork pertaining to local and national policy initiatives in various geographic focus areas and resource sectors. Within the five-year, $10.5 million KEMALA program, the grants given, accounting for $4 million, are used to build partnerships for change.
KEMALA builds on the momentum generated in a small-grants program BSP has run in Indonesia since 1994, through PeFoR, the Peoples, Forests, and Reefs program. This grantgiving activity, which began with a broadcast request for proposals (RFP), gradually gave BSP an in-depth understanding of Indonesia's environmental NGOs and their respective track records. In 1996, lawyer Nonette Royo, then PeFoR's Indonesia small grants coordinator, assessed Indonesia's NGOs for USAID/Indonesia's Natural Resources Management (NRM2) program, to consider further work supporting decentralized natural resources management. Royo integrated her PeFoR knowledge with background research about the big picture of Indonesia's NGO movement and traditional community-based natural resource management, soliciting recommendations during regional field visits. BSP's Indonesia and Washington, D.C.-based staff argued convincingly that for a new USAID-funded program to promote effective policy changes, it should facilitate long-term coalition-building to develop a network linking the on-the-ground programs of outer island local NGOs with policy-oriented national NGOs in Jakarta.
KEMALA today includes 30 partners. About a third are themselves networks of organizations. Locally based partners undertake fieldwork with communities and work on policy with local governments. National partners provide legal and policy analysis and TA to field-based partners. All partners receive three kinds of support from KEMALA: grants, TA, and networking facilitation. A key networking opportunity is the yearly KEMALA Partners' Forum, which convenes all partners, BSP, and USAID staff to conduct strategic planning according to a forum agenda determined by the partners.
KEMALA's partner selection process was instituted at the program's outset. It draws on the detailed understanding of the Indonesian NGO situation that KEMALA's BSP designers continually update with their ongoing field presence. In KEMALA's program design, each partner contributes to the whole. Existing partners have recommended new partners based on their analysis of what the KEMALA partner network needs to grow stronger, serve existing partners' needs, further their program aims, and complement their strengths.
The partner selection process begins with a rapid assessment of whether a prospective partner organization or network fits KEMALA's screening criteria. They are invited for preliminary discussions with one or two KEMALA senior program staff or a staff member and a consultant. KEMALA seeks organizations whose visions, plans, capacities, and linkages with other groups offer the highest potential for contributing to improving community-based natural resource management. The principal screening criterion is that qualifying partners have track records of advocating traditional natural resource management rights and for strengthening responsibilities and capacity at the local community level.
If a prospective partner fits the criteria, a KEMALA staff team led by the original assessors facilitates partner development of a fundable program. Prospective partners do not prepare written grant applications. They produce the equivalent of a "concept paper" in an oral planning process carried out with KEMALA staff. KEMALA sometimes funds short-term (three-month) planning grants, most often when the prospective KEMALA partner is a network. These fund planning workshops where all network partners can participate in the program development process. The planning work focuses on the partner's selection of—and comprehensive understanding of—a set of critical issues for their work program. It also focuses on determining the particular roles that a partner organization or network can most effectively take to produce desired results in policy-making and field settings. The partner organization or network then plans out a program of activities for at least two years, almost always more comprehensive than KEMALA funding would cover. The partner selects some key components of this planned program for KEMALA funding and seeks other sources of funding for the rest of the program. With KEMALA staff facilitation, partners complete a project proposal for an implementation grant focused on these key components, detailing projected budget and work products for one or two years.
Each KEMALA implementation grant agreement details what is expected of the partner and what the partner can expect from the program; it also specifies the monitoring evaluation outputs and reporting deliverables the partner will produce. KEMALA staff facilitate detailed work planning, an effective tool to help partners manage their own time and resources. Partners carefully assess their approved program, particularly its time constraints, their capacities and priorities, and possible changes from external dynamics. They finalize a budget and an activities timeframe, determining, for each activity, who is responsible, what methods, outputs, or expected results are anticipated; what outside parties are involved; and what additional support is required.
Flexibility and renewed partner funding are essential in this kind of grantgiving. KEMALA staff and partners keep project activities flexible through grant amendments, usually making at least one amendment within a two-year grant period. Indonesia has experienced tremendous government restructuring and decentralization over the past few years, and partners have refocused their activities to fit these changes. Flexibility has enabled partners to reap the windfall value of their grants after the Indonesian rupiah crashed. Some grants were extended to two years, and some partners extended support to other network members. Within KEMALA, virtually all partners continue on to "follow-on" grant agreements. KEMALA staff and partners carry out regular reviews and audits of activities and progress, using this information and that derived from monitoring and evaluation outcomes to refine partner objectives and approaches, select new activities, and negotiate a new grant agreement.
KEMALA devotes extensive staff time and resources to TA and capacity strengthening for partners through all phases of program design, implementation, and outcome monitoring. KEMALA senior program officers are assigned primary responsibility for no more than five partners so that they may spend enough time with each one. Administrative staff members monitor partner deliverables and handle similar tasks so that program officers can focus solely on content. In addition to providing technical assistance from program officers, KEMALA also spends one dollar on contracted TA to assist grantees for every four dollars KEMALA provides in direct grant funding.
Facilitating Program Development
KEMALA employs several program management tools to help partners identify key roles and an achievable program of outcome-oriented activities. These include extensive oral discussion in a process called a "strategic scoping tool" (SST, or "scoping"), used to determine a partner's overall role and the priority activities to achieve change on a specific issue. KEMALA consultant David Richards has explained that scoping "is used to determine the 20 percent of activities which will produce 80 percent of the results." Sometimes participants also employ "spatial scoping," a graphic presentation of the information elicited. On separate map overlays they indicate the distribution of threats and ecosystem constraints facing particular communities and natural resources.
From scoping, partners develop a "desired change scenario," focusing on a realistic, measurable and timely ideal or goal and determining the partner's optimal role in bringing about change on that key issue. Having identified the desired change and their key role, the partners come up with new ideas and innovative, catalytic programs for specific activities that would realize the desired changes. These programs often require local coalitions to achieve shared goals. The partners then identify the most realistic and urgent activities as their strategic objectives. In an iterative process they then reassess which activities and outcomes fit their mission and capacities. From all this work, the partners draw up a "project tree" or "project map," linking project goals, objectives, and activities that illustrate the flow of activities and outcomes leading to each strategic objective. This "project tree" becomes the initial project description and the basis for monitoring project progress. Scoping is used later to revise and review project activities based on monitored changes.
Ongoing Technical Assistance
All partners receive TA packages designed to meet specific institutional strengthening needs for organizational and program management. During the annual KEMALA forum, partners decide what TA is needed across the network, and KEMALA then usually provides for this. KEMALA facilitates TA for community organizing, policy work, mapping, gender work, and conflict resolution. KEMALA also supports regional autonomy training, financial management training, communications planning, and media and public outreach. Partner outreach focuses on conveying messages and lessons to other NGOs and critical target audiences that include government and local communities. Partners learn methods for systematic assessment of their organization's development and management via the "institutional development framework." [Callout: This framework was developed by consulting firm MSI, Inc. (Management Systems International), and its colleagues, including those at the World Wildlife Fund-Namibia LIFE (Living in a Finite Environment) project, and it was refined and disseminated by MSI. For more information, see Renzi 1996]. This framework guides partners through institutional self-scoring on five organizational components: vision, management resources, human resources, financial resources, and external resources.
KEMALA staff regularly facilitate TA by consultants, including partners strategically selected for the kinds of technical support they offer. Consultants sometimes come from international NGOs. For example, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), provided TA and mentoring in legal research and analysis from 1998 to 2001 to KEMALA partner ELSAM, a policy research and advocacy NGO and to other public interest lawyers. More often, Indonesian consultants and NGOs provide capacity strengthening and technical support. For example, Chandra Kirana has provided assistance to partners developing outreach strategy and work plans, and Ichsan Malik assisted the scoping process in North Sulawesi, facilitated numerous institutional development framework assessments, and co-facilitated several priority training workshops in conflict management.
Networking
Once a year the KEMALA Partners' Forum convenes all KEMALA partners, along with BSP staff and USAID representatives. Partners collaboratively determine the Forum's agenda and format, where strategic decisions about KEMALA objectives and overall direction are made. They select priorities for TA, outreach, and analytical and policy work. They discuss methods and policy issues and form thematic or regional collaborative groups to share information and coordinate activities. Partners also network about funding opportunities and have often been quite successful in obtaining funds from donors other than USAID.
KEMALA benefits from having a central theme and objective, so that partners are all working on very closely related activities, and sharing of experiences and resources comes naturally. In KEMALA, networking is about sharing skills through trainings and apprenticeships and about sharing resources through subgrants to field partners. BSP recognizes that all information is actually the NGO's or the community's own property. As these networks develop, they often institute formal protocols, and written by-laws, regarding transmitting information across the network.
Most networks that are KEMALA partners now get together on their own at least once a year for meetings, joint trainings, and joint strategic planning sessions. In the past network members were able to convene about once every three years, at best. KEMALA funding has allowed these networks to meet regularly face-to-face, and to incorporate partners from further afield in the vast Indonesian archipelago. Several new national networks have developed in association with KEMALA, and many forums have emerged where NGOs share experiences, resources, and skills with others, whether they are KEMALA partners or not. "Partners are bringing new NGOs within this fold all the time," notes KEMALA senior program officer Nonette Royo.
The 2000 KEMALA Partner Forum and Life after BSPAt the 2000 Forum, KEMALA partners held regional-based discussions to identify threats, problems facing local communities and their responses, services NGOs needed to supply, agendas for needed actions over the next year, and support needed from BSP-KEMALA. KEMALA partners recognize that there is a growing movement of community-based managers, and that the organization of this movement needs continued support beyond BSP's 2001 end date. Because some partners definitely feel the need for ongoing financial and technical support from outside donors, partners decided they should continue to work together to secure future funding and assistance for partners and others sharing common goals. They agreed on what was effective in the existing "partnership" with BSP-KEMALA:
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Partners agreed that an ideal replacement institution for BSP would be one purposely constructed to suit partner needs. In July 2000, partners formally established such an organization, named Yayasan Kemala. This will be an umbrella, non-implementing, non-profit organization that facilitates NGOs to promote the movement for democratic natural resources governance. Main activities will include: facilitating efforts to change paradigms, policies, laws, and strengthen local institutions; supporting research, development, and education; developing networks and media communications; obtaining a funding base; and developing a "peoples' economy" based on natural resources.
KEMALA team leader Kath Shurcliff emphasizes, "The most critical capacity strengthening work KEMALA can accomplish is instilling within partners the ability and commitment to monitor activity outcomes." Because finding out whether activities are really achieving their intended outcomes is so important, training in outcome monitoring and evaluation begins at the outset of a prospective partner's KEMALA association. Also key is the issue of improving accountability between an NGO and its client communities.
Monitoring has many components. Among the most important for guaranteeing compliance is that all concerned grasp the utility of the information being gathered. During one KEMALA Forum, some partners reflected that at first they had not fully understood the purpose of USAID indicators, and that sometimes it takes at least one year of reporting and using these indicators to fully understand why monitoring matters. Some partners are already highly motivated to carry out monitoring. Others benefit from staff reinforcement stressing the values of this element.
Project tree exercises help KEMALA partners think logically about producing results and about identifying their own information and monitoring needs. From the project tree, KEMALA and partners identify key outcomes and indicators and use these to develop a monitoring and evaluation plan. Partners identify who will be affected by the successes or failures of their key activities and outputs, such as the local community, the NGO itself, the donor, or policy makers. Together, KEMALA and the partner then ask some critical questions, to which indicators provide the objective answers. The questions include:
How will we know if we have reached this outcome?
Who should know this outcome information?
What is the proof that an action has been taken or has had an effect?
Does enough reliable knowledge indicate that the proposed course of action is necessary and sufficient? If not, what additional knowledge would be useful, and how can the grant program facilitate it?
KEMALA also facilitates workshops in on-site data analysis so that partners experience how monitoring data directly figures into decision making. Understanding how information improves management and enhances results also helps local organizations see why some information they do not think immediately useful still is needed by BSP and USAID. Another message of these workshops is that there is a constant need to monitor utility of information collected and refine data collection and reporting requirements.
Sharing of the lessons learned from the partners' activities is facilitated through regular workshops organized by the partners themselves. They have even established "learning networks" around specific topics such as community organizing and conflict resolution as well as the more formal networks for community mapping, community forestry, and coastal/marine issues. BSP KEMALA supplies the funds for these workshops and provides technical assistance so that partners integrate outreach into their programs' objectives and regular work plans.
A monthly series of "media tips" has been produced to help partners use the local mass media more effectively in reaching out to their local constituents. To spread information and lessons more rapidly within the fast growing NGO network, partners are using the Internet and electronic mail services. Grants help fund the costs of the computers, modems, and telephone connections. Several NGOs have their own Web sites, and BSP KEMALA maintains a Web site giving details of partners' projects and a photo gallery of activities. Various management and training tools used by staff can be downloaded from this Web site.
Words from the Wise:
Lessons Learned from KEMALA Grant Managers
Select grantees using clear selection criteria that are guided by the program objectives. Before requesting grant applications, we conduct field visits to identify likely grantees, based on selection criteria determined during the design of the program. Potential grantees are then asked to submit short, concise, concept papers, detailing what they want to achieve and how they plan to achieve it. Only after we have assessed what concepts fit with the program's objectives do we invite grantees to submit proposals for further planning or detailed proposals, and these are facilitated by BSP staff or consultants.
Create a diverse network of grantees that encompasses a broad spectrum of experience. Grantees were selected on a portfolio basis, to represent categories of field-based activities in selected geographic regions, policy sectors, and legal support. Other grantees were added to supply specific technical support as requested by existing partners. This approach resulted in building a core group of 30 active Indonesian grantees who were able to produce tangible results (as indicated by monitoring indicators), and who have now created their own umbrella organization to maintain the initiatives of the KEMALA program.
Take a "partnership" approach to maintain support with grantees. Because grant programs and grantees often are trying to achieve long-term, difficult goals, they need support that matches those needs. This support can best be delivered by a "partnership" approach consisting of these essential elements: shared vision of what is trying to be achieved; clearly written program objectives and indicators to measure success; commitment to support each grantee's activities over the life of the program if adequate progress is achieved (as measured by monitoring indicators and deliverables); shared work planning, and periodic reviews of progress; and an annual forum where partners meet to review progress and problems. Because the ratio of BSP staff to grantees is high—one staff member for every five or six grantees—staff are able to spend adequate time facilitating and understanding partners' activities. Flexibility in agreed-upon outputs is provided by six-month reviews and grant agreement amendments if necessary. Similarly, reviews of BSP service provision to partners have been done each year at the Forum meeting.
Award an initial short-term grant to assess grantee capacity and maximize accountability. Initial grants are given for a period of one to two years. After the initial grant period, a new grant agreement is negotiated if the partner has achieved satisfactory progress, as measured by the USAID results indicators. Experience to date shows that this system works fairly well, improving accountability, but still maintaining flexibility. For example, yearly audits of some partners have disclosed management issues that had to be resolved before any further grant advance payments could be made.
Technical assistance support should meet partners' self-assessed needs and include substantial investments in program management tools. We have developed a tool kit to facilitate partners' creation of more focused and effective work programs. These strategic planning tools include strategic scoping, spatial scoping, desired change scenario-building, and such program planning tools as participatory program planning and project mapping, identification of key outcomes and indicators to measure these, annual and quarterly work planning, and outreach strategies based on project maps. The institutional development framework has been introduced to help partners assess their own organizational management strengths and weaknesses, and it is used as a basis to identify and prioritize their own training and development needs. Several partners, especially those based in the field, have indicated that this support has been the most useful part of our program.
Actively facilitate networking to share resources, skills, and learning. The BSP-KEMALA portfolio includes several national and regional networks supplying legal aid and analysis, participatory mapping training and information, coastal and marine issues, forest monitoring, community forestry, conflict resolution, and community organizing. Through these networks, more than 100 additional NGOs have received assistance from KEMALA partners. These networks meet at least once a year to discuss issues and action plans. Additionally, several "learning networks" have been developed that a number of NGOs facing similar challenges can convene regularly to share experiences and lessons. These meetings involve "homework" in the field between meetings. Networking through apprenticeships also promotes the sharing of mapping skills. Several members of an NGO spend up to two months working with an experienced team in another location. Grants are given to both trainer and trainee NGOs. Approximately 25 percent of all grant monies are spent on travel for these meetings and skills sharing. In addition, all KEMALA partners meet once a year to review progress and discuss future directions.
Use locally available technical assistance as a means of supporting capacity building. NGO partners often provide technical assistance for legal analysis, forestry policy analysis, gender awareness training, conflict resolution, community organizing, and community participatory mapping. In each case, the partners have developed training modules and manuals based on their own experiences of what does and does not work. Often, a manual's contents are decided in a week-long workshop of numerous practitioners; then a small team writes it up. The draft manual is circulated widely field-tested with trainings in the regions, and revised accordingly. The manual-writing and training are done by members of NGOs with relevant experience, and overseen by one NGO that receives a grant to complete the work. In several cases, specific technical guidance (for example, forestry policy, legal analysis, or participatory mapping) is provided to the NGO by a consultant Technical Advisor. This approach is designed to meet needs as assessed directly by the NGO activists themselves. Because assessments of the trainings are still ongoing, no definite statement can be made as to how effective this approach has been in producing real outcomes.