Deadline: 29-Apr-24
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) invites interested and eligible non-state actors to submit proposals for award of grants in a programme “Strengthening Community Feedback Mechanisms for Inclusive Peace, Security and Development” to strengthen social accountability mechanisms in Wajir, Garissa and Mandera at the local level.
The Promoting Peace and Inclusive Development Project (Promoting Peace Project) in the borderland counties in Northeastern Kenya is a joint project implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Office of the Deputy President (ODP).
Objectives
- The objectives of this Grants Programme is to strengthen community engagement mechanisms, targeting women, youth, and other local peace structures, to ensure that appropriate mechanisms and communication strategies are used to listen to communities’ needs, feedback, and complaints, facilitating them to actively participate and guide interventions in peace, security, and development programming. Listening and acting on people’s needs and opinions will provide peace, security, and/or development stakeholders with better insights on the priorities of affected communities, making initiatives more sustainable and relevant . Specifically, the grants programme will seek to:
- Design and implement feedback cycles that bring continuous and real time information into the day-to-day decision making on peace, security and/or development at the county level.
- Improve the relationship and build trust between communities and peace, security and/or development stakeholders. This will be realized through the regular information provided by these communities.
- Empower communities by providing them with platforms for communicating their needs and concerns, giving them a space to have a say in the decisions that affect them.
- The Grants Programme will provide support to Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Mandera, Wajir and Garissa to strengthen the community feedback mechanisms that target women, youth and selected local structures for peace. The Grants Programme will utilize the Constituent Voice methodology from Ground Solutions which consists of systematically collecting the views of affected people on key aspects of selected sectors (peace, security and/or development), analyzing what the affected communities are saying, making sense of the data together with the affected communities and communicating the results and insights back to them. The objective of this approach is to provide real-time, actionable information from communities that can be translated into improvements while empowering them to express their views.
- The Civil Society Organisations will be expected to help the targeted communities (women, youth, local peace structures) to strengthen/establish feedback mechanisms in the following ways:
- Designing topics/questions that improve understanding on key projects/interventions that are being implemented in peace, security and/or development. The topics/issues should be key to the women/youth/local structures for peace and should be amenable to action by the peace/security/development stakeholders implementing the identified interventions/projects. The topics should relate to:
- The quality and relevance of interventions in peace, security and/or development.
- the quality of relations between these target groups and stakeholders working in either of these three sectors
- Their perceptions of key results from the interventions that have been put in place.
- Regularly collect data, from the target groups on the above issues using context-specific methodologies such as face – to face interviews, targeted dialogues etc.
- Analyze the data with an objective of presenting this to the target communities in ways that they can easily understand. The data should be disaggregated by key characteristics such a gender, age, sub county and other key demographics.
- Dialogue with the communities to seek their views on the findings and potential recommendations for changes/interventions.
- Advocate for actions through addressing some of the issues identified in the dialogues as well as utilizing the data as an advocacy tool for improvements.
- Produce and disseminate the ground truth reports as a way of knowledge and experience sharing.
- Document the process.
- Designing topics/questions that improve understanding on key projects/interventions that are being implemented in peace, security and/or development. The topics/issues should be key to the women/youth/local structures for peace and should be amenable to action by the peace/security/development stakeholders implementing the identified interventions/projects. The topics should relate to:
Thematic Focus
- Mandera, Wajir and Garissa counties, key borderland counties within the ASALs, face multiple and interlinked socio-economic factors coupled with inter/intra clan conflicts and security challenges and compounded by longstanding marginalization and exclusion. Over the years, government and development partners have conducted assessments, developed plans, programmes and policies to address the multiple challenges with limited success. Furthermore, the minimal involvement of communities has undermined efforts to shore up peace and stability in the region. In Northeast Kenya as well as other parts of the country, women and youth have traditionally been excluded from decision-making. The Promoting Peace project will seek to contribute to the empowerment of women, youth, and marginalized groups in peace, security and/or development. These groups will be provided with safe spaces/platforms to continuously provide information on peace, security and/ordevelopment projects that the engage with.
Funding Information
- Proposals with budgets of up to KES. 3,000,000.00
- Duration: All the activities financed by this Grants programme must be implemented by 31 August 2024
Eligible Activities
- Design workshops to develop questions that will be regularly asked to the target groups, ensuring consistent data to allow for comparative analysis. The questions should bring out issues that are important to the affected groups and amenable to action by various policy makers/program designers.
- Data collection related activities (Focus Group Discussions, Face to Face interviews, SMS surveys, etc.)
- Data analysis related costs.
- Dialogues with internal (organizational) and external parties (communities/other relevant actors).
- Joint consultations with policy makers and development partners to share with them some of the proposed actions.
- Information, sensitization, and awareness campaigns on some of the actions identified from the dialogue sessions.
- Periodic ground truth reports, highlighting targeted groups issues, recommendations and actions taken.
Ineligible Activities
- Equipment, cars, infrastructure
- Activities that are strictly for private sector
- Activities that don’t link to county level policy/ systems.
- International travel
Outcomes
- The Project will seek to realize two outcomes:
- Outcome 1: Strengthened trust and cooperation between security agencies and communities to create a conducive and collaborative environment for human security, social cohesion and sustainable development.
- Outcome 2: Institutional (including donor) coordination capacities of county and national governments strengthened to contribute to a people-centered and conflict sensitive approach to promoting peace and sustainable development in the counties of Mandera, Wajir and Garissa.
Ineligible Project
- The following types of project proposals are not eligible for funding:
- Project proposals concerned only or mainly with individual sponsorships for participation in workshops, seminars, conferences, congresses.
- Project proposals concerned only or mainly with individual scholarships for studies or training courses.
- Credit or loan schemes.
- Project proposals which consist exclusively or primarily of capital expenditure e.g., land, buildings, equipment, vehicles, etc.
- Project proposals which do not demonstrate equal treatment for individuals or groups of people on grounds of their gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or lack of them, or their ethnic origin.
- Cash donations.
- Political parties or religious activities.
- Project proposals that support activities that are not in line with the values of the UN or that provide funding for any criminal activities including but not limited to terrorism.
Geographical Scope
- The call for proposals targets Civil Society Organizations that have a working presence in the three counties of Mandera, Wajir and Garissa. Two CSOs per county will be awarded the grants.
Eligibility Criteria
- To be eligible for a grant, applicants must:
- Be a Kenyan civil society organizations and indigenous people’s organizations registered under the Societies Act.
- Be directly responsible for the preparation and management of the project, i.e. not acting as an intermediary;
- Have a bank account.
For more information, visit UNDP.