BSP has sometimes developed grantgiving components within more comprehensive regional conservation programs. Grantgiving has been directed at the programs' strategic objectives, helping to strengthen local recipients' capacity to work towards these objectives long after the relationship with BSP ends. Two BSP programs are profiled here. Regional presence and extensive field office administration of grantgiving are integral to both. Capacity strengthening and TA are integral throughout these programs, starting at partner selection. Through quite different processes, both programs employ proactive selection methods strategically oriented towards developing long-term relationships focused on partner implementation of program goals in their respective regions.
The Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment seeks to identify and promote the conditions and practices necessary for long-term conservation and sustainable use of the Congo Basin's forests and other biological resources. The forests of Cameroon, Central African Republic (CAR), Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon together form one of the world's greatest expanses of closed canopy habitat. The Congo Basin is increasingly subject to pressure from population growth, unsustainable resource use, poor management, and other problems related to poverty and political instability. CARPE aims to help reduce deforestation rates and encourage sustainable economic growth in ways that address local, national, regional and international concerns. Funded by USAID and conceived as a twenty-year program, CARPE is collaboratively operated by several U.S. government agencies and international environmental NGOs, including BSP. These are considered CARPE's core partners. CARPE also has an Advisory Group, three of whose five members are Africans.
CARPE's first phase (1995–2000) has focused mainly on gathering and synthesizing information about the state of the forests and threats to their biodiversity. During this time, some of the core partners involved with CARPE's operation have also tried out promising tools and methods to implement conservation-oriented activities. BSP has done this through its administration and management of the CARPE Strategic Objective Support (SOS) grant fund. BSP established the CARPE-SOS fund in 1996 with USAID monies allocated for this purpose. The fund is a flexible "pipeline" whose mechanism allows BSP to determine at all times how much money to allocate to what, without a yearly maximum or minimum. While this flexibility facilitates program development, it sometimes proves tricky in terms of balancing the grant program with other needed BSP/CARPE project outlays, including salaries, equipment, and information dissemination. While all grant funding is at BSP's discretion, BSP chooses to solicit core partner input regarding CARPE-SOS allocation.
All CARPE-SOS grantees are considered extended partners of CARPE if they are not from core partner institutions. BSP/CARPE's SOS grant fund objectives are to support extended and core partners (including BSP itself) in information gathering and dissemination and in implementing conservation-oriented activities that directly address CARPE's central programmatic objectives related to protected areas, environmental governance, forestry and forest exploitation, and household level interventions such as collection of non-timber forest products, and CARPE's overall objective of long-term conservation and sustainable use of the Congo Basin's natural resources. The SOS grant fund also has the objectives of encouraging and facilitating African participation in and ownership of CARPE and promoting development of African individuals and institutions, strengthening linkages between U.S.-based and African partners, and funding activities defined during the ongoing re-engineering of the overall CARPE project not currently funded under existing USAID cooperative agreements with core partners.
CARPE-SOS grants are awarded from two categories, best described as Local Initiative Fund grants and other CARPE-SOS fund grants. Local Initiative grants are discretionary funds awarded directly by the BSP/CARPE project field office in Libreville, Gabon. Local Initiative awards range from a few hundred dollars up to $10,000, with an average grant size of about $6,000. By mid-2000, the Local Initiative grant program had disbursed close to $265,000 in 36 grants.
The other CARPE-SOS grants are awarded either by BSP/CARPE's grant manager in Washington, D.C., or by the field office, in either case after a peer-review process that involves CARPE's other core partners. These awards range from a few hundred dollars to about $300,000, with most in the $10,000 to $90,000 range. By mid-2000, 96 non-Local Initiative CARPE-SOS grants, totaling about $2.3 million had been allocated. Both grant funds cover a similar range of regional and country-specific project activities, all consonant with CARPE goals. All Local Initiative grants and some of the other CARPE-SOS grants advance activities and capacity building among local, national and regional NGOs and individuals from the Congo Basin.
More Local Initiative CARPE-SOS grants have been awarded in Cameroon than in any other country, because Cameroon is fairly stable politically, and its in-country NGOs are more numerous, professional, and dynamic than elsewhere in Central Africa. Cameroon was also the first country assigned a BSP/CARPE "focal point," an in-country BSP/CARPE representative. Significant Local Initiative SOS funds have also been disbursed in Gabon, Central African Republic, and other countries where local NGOs are only beginning to develop in earnest. DRC has only recently been included in CARPE, where BSP has now awarded a small number of grants.
Strategic Partner Selection
Non-Local Initiative CARPE-SOS grants are awarded for studies addressing CARPE's main programmatic objectives, as travel grants or similar small-scale funding for core partners, or, since 1999, as result dissemination grants to fund write-up and presentation of completed CARPE-associated projects. Core partners have received the largest such grants, usually to plug gaps in their direct USAID funding, providing for a workshop or other key activity that this funding had not covered. The CARPE-SOS guidelines specify that field-based funding applications should be routed through the field office, and others should go through BSP/CARPE's Washington, D.C., office. All these applications are sent on for comments to selected core CARPE partners, Advisory Group members, and to other peer reviewers with pertinent technical expertise. On the basis of these comments and on the applicability of these proposals to the programmatic criteria, the BSP/CARPE manager or the BSP/CARPE field office then decides whether to fund and what conditions to impose.
As Robert Solem, BSP/CARPE regional coordinator explains, Local Initiative grants have regularly funded local projects "even if not closely linked to CARPE objectives, if we felt the organization had the potential to undertake more closely related activities in future. Our approach has enabled us to get more local partners involved, build up good relations with a lot of partners, get them familiar with the program's core objectives, and, very importantly, build their capacity." Local Initiative grants are awarded from a discretionary fund administered solely by the BSP-CARPE field office and focal points. Applicants seeking Local Initiative funds apply directly to these offices, which evaluate the application and work with the applicant to modify it, if necessary. Although the field office approves these grants without being obliged to consult with BSP-Washington staff or any other core CARPE partner, BSP/CARPE field personnel often will seek technical advice and expertise from core partners in the course of evaluating an application.
Local Initiative and other CARPE-SOS funds are publicized through a combination of BSP personnel and CARPE core partners informing potential grantees of the opportunity, giving them the application guidelines, or asking them to contact the field office directly. Present and former grantees also advertise the program, what BSP/CARPE's Washington, D.C., manager Laurent Some calls "beating the drum." Developing fundable local projects is an iterative process between applicants and BSP/CARPE staff, for very few of these applications are ready for funding as first submitted. The CARPE focal point is key to this development, and a focal point recommendation to fund factors heavily into the ultimate funding decision, as does the endorsement of a CARPE core partner.
After reviewing an application, the focal point gets back to the applicant, preferably in person, to go over both format and content. A visit to the applicant organization may reveal that an NGO has proposed an activity it just does not have the infrastructure—office space, telephone, fax, office manager—needed to carry it out. Being a "briefcase NGO" does not necessarily disqualify an applicant for funding, but it may require reconfiguring the project. If a required section is missing, if activities do not match the objective, or if the dates or scope of proposed activities are unrealistic, BSP/CARPE and the applicant will discuss both the problem and measures needed to rectify it. For example, BSP/CARPE Cameroon focal point Nicodeme Tchamou recalls one applicant who proposed to interview 12 households per day in a survey of non-timber forest products consumption. Tchamou directed the applicant to cut back to five interviews per day, reminding him that he was overestimating his own stamina and forgetting to allow extra time for the customary formalities essential before a stranger might be permitted the impertinence of inquiring into a household's economic operations.
Even in Cameroon the NGO and research communities are still quite small, so a grant manager's personal familiarity with the details of research activities, projects, and donors functioning in the area can be real assets. Tchamou, a Cameroonian, brings years of in-country experience as a scientific researcher and extension officer to his post. He assesses every grant application in terms of what else is under way or being funded (by anyone) in the region, to help ensure that SOS-funded projects complement, without duplicating, other initiatives in the region or represent needed new initiatives. Tchamou also notes that someone higher up in the organization should always be the one to reject inadequate proposals, so that everyone in-country can save face and continue working together. Tchamou's background gives him the needed context to evaluate proposals and ask the right heads-up questions. Once he received a proposal "with a very familiar format." With a few discreet inquiries, he was not surprised to discover another donor had funded that proposal a year before. When challenged, the applicant claimed he wanted to make an experimental replication to study a trend, but Tchamou knew it would be too soon for that to have statistical significance. "He never came back with a revised application, confirming my hunch that he only wanted money and would have submitted the same results to me as he had given the other donor." Tchamou has experienced other incidents like this, and warns other grantgivers to be alert to people "mainly in it for the money. Writing a proposal is difficult, and if one is accepted by a donor, those people know it's a good proposal and they may try to use it again."
Grantee Capacity Strengthening
Capacity strengthening in BSP/CARPE's programs focuses on local grant recipients.
Local Grants as Capacity Strengthening Endeavors
Funded at up to $10,000, CARPE-SOS Local Initiative grants are "start-up grants," designed to give grantees an opportunity to improve their administrative and technical capacity and put themselves on the funding map, improving their eligibility to be evaluated for a larger grant, whether from CARPE-SOS or another donor. By effectively completing a relatively modest project with a modest sum of grant money, submitting financial and technical reports along the way, NGOs in Central Africa develop a funding track record while simultaneously building their facility with reporting and record keeping. BSP/CARPE staff review grantee reports and guide grantees in making revisions.
Like many grant agreements, the CARPE-SOS agreement contains a plethora of donor-mandated standard provisions. Grantees from the region often find this obligatory information confusing or irrelevant to their project. Along with translating the official grant agreement into French, the BSP/CARPE field office has also worked up a brief summary of key elements of the USAID guidelines, including schedules and formats for grantee reports and financial accounting, records and documentation grantees must keep and submit, procedures for alterations or adjustments, and consequences of grantee non-compliance. BSP's CARPE-SOS Local Initiative managers always review a new contract orally, in a face-to-face meeting with grantees, to ensure their familiarity with all obligations, particularly as signing a written contract may not carry as much weight in the customs of a CARPE-SOS grantee country as it does in the donor country.
Renforcement de CapacitéIf you're visiting a CARPE-SOS grant manager in French-speaking Central Africa, you're likely to hear the term "Renforcement de Capacité," or "capacity reinforcement." This useful phrase reminds grantgivers that they're never starting from scratch: all grantees approach a project with certain important abilities and knowledge in place. The grantor's role is to reinforce that knowledge and capacity by helping the grantee build up complementary capacities. For example, in countries where NGOs are relatively new, training in fundraising and accounting practices will complement NGO personnel's existing capacity to assess cultural impacts of habitat destruction and to network locally. This combination of grantee capacity and grantor capacity reinforcement leads to a more effective conservation-oriented organization. |
BSP/CARPE also promotes local capacity building by facilitating core CARPE partners to work with and mentor local organizations and employ local field staff in their CARPE-SOS funded projects. Rob Solem explains, "We identify regional organizations that might interest our CARPE partners in the United States. We believe it is a better approach for them to work through in-country NGOs. The idea in the development world is to work yourself out of a job; we hope this idea takes hold strongly in the conservation world, too." Any core partner organization seeking funding must state in its proposal precisely what part local NGOs will play in the project's implementation. Since requiring core partners to work with local NGOs will necessarily increase their transaction costs, BSP/CARPE often embeds into core partner grants the funds needed for training and TA for local participants. That way, the core partner has the necessary funds to help raise local capacity to carry out research and reporting on a level meeting the core partner's (and USAID's) own technical standards. For example, Global Forest Watch (GFW), a program of World Resources Institute (WRI), a core partner and a CARPE-SOS grantee, works with a network of local NGOs to gather information on forest development activities. In its CARPE-SOS grant GFW received extra CARPE-SOS funding to help raise the research and reporting capacity of these NGOs to meet WRI publication standards.
Field Presence and Technical Assistance
The CARPE-SOS grant program is often called "the local face of CARPE." Of all programs run by CARPE's core partners, BSP/CARPE's grant funds are the ones most likely to be familiar to Congo Basin individuals and institutions. CARPE-SOS facilitates most of the CARPE-funded local initiatives and local capacity development aligned with CARPE's promotion of long-term conservation and sustainable use of Congo Basin biological resources. The effort does not go unappreciated. CARPE-SOS Local Initiative grantee Roger Ngoufo praises BSP/CARPE's innovation in choosing "to support and empower local NGOs in contrast to other organizations which merely state that there are no ‘credible' NGOs in the country."
Dedicated field presence is essential to this regional high profile. BSP/CARPE's project field office in Libreville, Gabon, is home base for Local Initiative fund management, with extensive support from BSP/CARPE "focal point" personnel in Cameroon and DRC and support and oversight from the BSP/CARPE staff in Washington, D.C. For the other CARPE-SOS fund grants, the Libreville office and BSP headquarters in Washington, D.C., are both involved in management, with a long-term intention to move all CARPE grant management into the field. The focal point offices were not originally envisioned as part of the BSP/CARPE structure, but their contributions have proven invaluable. Even so, one frequent grantee criticism of CARPE-SOS is that the staff is so overtaxed with responsibilities that it slows down evaluation of applications.
Once it became evident that local capacity strengthening was needed to make local involvement in CARPE really work, virtually all of BSP-CARPE's field personnel, from focal points to communications managers and accountants, have become involved in the process, serving ad-hoc as grantee trainers in their areas of expertise. For example, BSP/CARPE's Gabon-based accountant gives one-on-one training to CARPE-SOS grantees in how to prepare the required CARPE-SOS financial reports. Financial management training may be one of the most important things grantees gain in the course of a CARPE-SOS grant. Along with coaching in writing applications and reports, BSP/CARPE focal points pay visits, sometimes planned, sometimes unannounced, to both project sites and in-town offices to evaluate grantee progress on their projects, and help them revise plans if they need to adjust their project timetables. In Gabon, especially, many CARPE-SOS grantees use the CARPE field office as their in-town office, borrowing the fax, the telephone, and the copying machine, and doing project business there with other grantees and contacts. In Cameroon the BSP-CARPE focal point office has established a resource room where grantees may peruse conservation reports and journals.
BSP/CARPE's field presence benefits many core partners. For example, as J.G. Collomb, Global Forest Watch's Central Africa project manager explains, "Logistically, BSP/CARPE has been essential for the development of Global Forest Watch in Central Africa. GFW staff is based in the United States. We needed to develop a set of local partners, and to do so we relied very heavily on the focal points in Cameroon and Gabon, who talked to the NGOs and the government, arranged our meeting schedule in advance, and gave us detailed information on local conditions. We also use their offices to hold meetings or simply plug in a computer. Otherwise we would be in the country totally cold; we would have to make all our phone calls from the hotel, with no place to convene." Today the GFW and BSP/CARPE relationship is even closer. GFW's new Cameroon coordinator, Henriette Bikie, shares an office with CARPE. Collomb reports, "She has benefited from being in touch with environmental issues beyond those of GFW's immediate concern. The close affiliation helps create a network of environmentalists in Cameroon."
Training Sessions and Networking
BSP/CARPE has facilitated capacity strengthening for the local NGO community in Central Africa through diverse training sessions. Sometimes it funds grants for workshops held by local NGOs or a core CARPE partner, such as a 1999 workshop in Cameroon, organized by one environmental NGO to help develop the advocacy capacities of environmental NGOs in the country.
On other occasions, BSP/CARPE itself holds workshops for all interested grantees. For example, in October 1998, BSP/CARPE conducted a training session in managerial capacity strengthening for environmental NGOs. The Kinshasa NGO, Bleu-Blanc, produces environmental conservation cartoon booklets for children. At BSP/CARPE's one-day workshop on grant management principles and practices, held in 2000, Bleu-Blanc's director and accountant said what they had learned in the 1999 workshop led them to overhaul their entire accounting system and to send even more staff members to this year's workshop.
Workshops are also networking events for local grantees. In Cameroon, Tchamou holds occasional workshops where local grantees formally present their projects and findings and network informally, a practice BSP/CARPE means to extend to other countries. Roger Ngoufo of Cameroon Environmental Watch said this event "allowed us to hear evaluations from people of diverse backgrounds about the relevance of our work." In 1999 BSP/CARPE sponsored a forum about local forest resource management systems, one of the central CARPE programmatic topics. This meeting allowed the several local NGO and research institution grantees working on this subject to compare findings from their various study sites and to practice presenting these findings in as accessible a manner as possible.
For several years now, BSP/CARPE has also provided grant funding to support NGO representation at the biennial Congo Basin-wide conference of CEFDHAC (Conference on Dense and Humid Forest Ecosystems of Central Africa) attended by stakeholders that included timber companies, NGOs, and representatives of environment ministers from throughout Central Africa. Since NGOs are CARPE's primary clients, CARPE has tried to promote their involvement and make them real partners in CEFDHAC, earmarking funds to support NGO networking. Without this support, it is likely that the opportunity for NGO representatives to be present and interact at CEFDHAC with private sector and government delegates would be greatly impaired. BSP/CARPE also supports regional networking through its support of the IUCN Sustainable Use Specialist Group for Central Africa and its support of AFAN, the African Forest Action Network; the Sangha River Network in Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Congo; and the African Women for Sustainable Development network.
Monitoring and Results Dissemination
Both the Local Initiative grants and the other CARPE-SOS grants have served knowledge building in CARPE's first phase, playing a significant role in identifying gaps in knowledge and practice that can be addressed in later CARPE phases. As Solem notes: "The grant funding practices we have adopted have allowed us to amass information on all sorts of issues, accumulating a broad range of knowledge about the Central African forest." If the CARPE-SOS grant program continues, even Local Initiative grantgiving is likely to focus more on funding only CARPE priority activities that address these gaps.
Applications ask prospective grantees to discuss expected project outcomes in terms of conservation impact, but baseline monitoring and ongoing evaluations of the conservation impact of projects are not required components of CARPE-SOS grants. This is partly because of the short time period in which most of the grants are conducted, and partly because the greater emphasis is on monitoring and evaluating the NGO's own development, as a necessary preliminary step in developing local conservation capacity.
This approach is already paying off. Some grantees have identified monitoring and evaluation as something they would like to learn to do better, as Jean Marie Mindja, organizer of the African Women for Sustainable Development network, says, "Since we are involved in an environmental project, we would like to become familiar with environmental impact assessment so that we could conduct monitoring efficiently." A few grantee NGOs are already developing new projects with significant environmental monitoring components. For example, Cameroon Environmental Watch, a local GFW partner, having completed a Local Initiative-funded project, has now submitted a project proposal to CARPE-SOS for a larger grant to focus on mapping, monitoring, and ground-truthing reported logging activities within and around the Dja Forest Reserve in south-central Cameroon.
Funding the dissemination of the knowledge gained through the grant program is an increasingly important part of BSP/CARPE's grantgiving activity. All interim and final technical reports filed at BSP/CARPE are available for consultation at focal point libraries and are to be compiled on a CD-ROM. Some are being written up (in both French and English) for dissemination as short "briefing sheets." Grantees are being funded to give "brown bag" and other presentations of results in both Central Africa and overseas. Some BSP/CARPE workshops are specifically organized to disseminate grantee results, such as the July 2000 NTFP workshop that met to present results from all of BSP/CARPE's NTFP-related grants.
Proposal Development and Selection
The following lessons were developed from CARPE's small grants program in Central Africa.
Develop clear proposal selection criteria and proposal writing guidelines. Clear proposal selection criteria help ensure that the proposals submitted are relevant to the objectives of the grants program. Proposal writing guidelines also help ensure that the proposals are complete and include all the key elements of a proposal: objectives, calendar of activities, and budget. The more explicit we were about what information we required in the proposal, the less time we spent going back and forth with a potential grantee.
Visit prior field activities of potential grantees whenever feasible. We have learned that, if at all possible, it is a good idea to visit potential grantees' earlier field activities. This enables us to better evaluate their capacity and effectiveness and to become familiar with their working environment so that we are aware of the opportunities and constraints they face.
Discuss all proposals with potential grantees before funding. All proposals should be discussed with potential grantees before funding. One reason for this is that potential grantees occasionally hire outsiders to write their proposals and do not really know their full content. Face-to-face discussions with potential grantees help us ensure that they know exactly what they want to do and how they plan to do it.
It is just as important to discuss budgets and calendars of activities with all grantees. We have found that most potential grantees in Central Africa have limited experience preparing budgets and tend to either overbudget or underbudget their activities. This is also true for the calendar of activities. Almost all of our grantees have underestimated how long it would take them to complete their activities.
Send technical proposals for an outside review. If a proposed activity is highly technical or exceeds the experience of the grantmaking organization, it is best to seek outside review. This review can provide important technical feedback for the potential grantee and lead to a better proposal. In addition, the outside reviewer can also be called upon to review and provide feedback on grantees' technical reports, and in some cases, outside review may lead to the development of a mentoring relationship whereby the more experienced NGO provides technical support for the less experienced local NGO.
Coordinate with other donors. Contact other donors operating in the region to see if they may already be funding the same proposal or to see if they have any information about the potential grantee. In some cases, because potential grantees submit the same proposal to a variety of donors, it is not uncommon for a potential grantee to receive duplicate funding for the same activity. Even when this is not the case, another donor might be able to provide some valuable information about the strengths or weaknesses of the potential grantee based upon past experiences.
Check references of potential grantees. Whenever possible, it is important to check the references of potential grantees to see how they are viewed by others. In addition to references provided by the potential grantee, it is important to look for other individuals or organizations that may also know the potential grantees and may be able to comment objectively on their work.
Conduct pre-award audits of the potential grantees. To determine whether the potential grantee has the financial capacity to manage the level of funding requested, it is essential to conduct a pre-award audit (or financial review). This can be a formal audit for organizations requesting substantial amounts of funding or an informal review by the grant manager for organizations requesting smaller amounts of funding. A pre-award audit also enables the grant manager to identify weaknesses in the potential grantee's financial and administrative management so that he can develop a training program to improve the potential grantee's capacities. If it is determined that potential grantees have no prior track record for managing funds, provide no more than a minimal level of funding until their financial management capacity is proven.
Explain the approval process to potential grantees and keep them apprised of the progress. Where grants are approved by an outside body (not directly by the grant manager), it is important that the grant manager explain the approval process to the potential grantee. This helps avoid any misunderstandings between the grant manager and potential grantee and helps develop a good relationship based upon communication and trust. The potential grantee should also be periodically apprised of the progress of the proposal through the approval process.
Contracting
Make contracts clear and simple and discuss them point by point with grantees. Our grant agreements were so complex that most of our grantees probably did not thoroughly read them, which frequently led them to neglect their contractual obligations. Consequently, we adopted the practice of reviewing the grant agreements one-on-one with our grantees to ensure that they understood the major provisions. Although this action helped improve compliance with the grant agreements, a preferable action would be to reduce the length of contracts to three to five pages, written in the local language, that focus on the key responsibilities of each party.
Grantee bank account information should be triple-checked to avoid problems in transferring funds. We found that grantees have frequently given us incorrect bank account information, which led to funds either being sent to the wrong account or getting returned to us. This has resulted in delays of a month or more in getting funds to the grantees. This, in turn, caused delays in completing the activity, which eventually required a grant amendment to extend the length of the grant.
Inform grantees when grant funds are disbursed. Wiring funds to other countries in Central Africa can take anywhere from one week to more than a month. In addition, many banks will not inform their clients when funds have been received, or they incorrectly inform them that the funds have not been received when, in fact, they have. Consequently, it is important to inform grantees when funds are sent and then to fax them a copy of the bank transfer order so that they have a document they can use to pressure their banks into disbursing their funds as soon as they are received.
Grant Monitoring
Ensure sufficient technical oversight by making frequent site visits as well as frequent visits to grantee headquarters. To the extent possible, it is important to visit grantees' activities in the field to see how things are going and assist them technically if they should need help. In addition, it is important to visit grantees' headquarters to monitor the financial management of the grants (primarily the accounting) in order to correct any problems while they are still small. Although this may sound a bit heavy handed, all of our grantees viewed our visits as capacity building and greatly appreciated the support.
Communicate frequently with grantees to preclude any problems. While some grantees diligently maintain communication with us, most do not. Consequently, we find it helpful to send them reminders when reports are due (or if they are overdue) to encourage them to submit reports in a more timely fashion while showing our interest in the grant activity. If the grant manager is uncommunicative, it shows a lack of interest and oversight, which can lead to sloppy grant management (e.g., lack of respect for deadlines, less rigorous financial management) on the part of the grantee.