Accelerating locally-led humanitarian response in Ukraine, through governance and capacity strengthening with LNAs

Pilot phase: Before the full rollout of NGO assessment through passporting, a testing of the tool for assessing partner NGOs was conducted in order to adapt it to the Ukrainian realities and pilot the process.

Conducting a due diligence (passporting): After making changes to the passporting tool, the process of assessing the 29 local NGOs which are the Alliance’s partners that joined the project as participants has begun. The participating NGOs were very diverse in terms of the organization’s size, experience, number of staff, budget size and location.

Capacity Development Action Plan. Based on the results of the post-passporting assessment, each partner NGO in collaboration with supervisors made an individual development plan. To create a clearer general plan and understanding of the NGOs priorities the Alliance conducted 7 workshops which resulted in a common plan for development for all NGOs which included a training plan, a post-training consulting support plan and a plan for individual and group supervisions.

Capacity strengthening. The Alliance organized and conducted 17 online and offline trainings of various durations and 8 post-training support consultations. The trainings covered the following topics: fundraising, grant writing, social entrepreneurship, NGO management, policies and procedures, prevention of professional burnout, mental health and resilience. For prolonged capacity development, even after the end of the project, two courses of online lessons on the topics of Grant writing and Fundraising were developed. Another area of strengthening the capacity of NGOs were regular supervision meetings, both individual and group. In total 319 individual and 57 group supervisions were conducted for the regional NGOs` professionals. The main topics of supervision were prevention of professional burnout, support of mental health and resilience. The Alliance also engaged two legal experts on policies and procedures who helped 11 NGOs conducting a substantive audit of existing policies and procedures as well as creating new policies that these NGOs lacked.

Re-assessment. After a year of training and supporting the development of NGOs it became clear that capacity level of each partner organization participating in the project has increased. Therefore, there was a need for re-passporting in order to see the progress and record a better result in the certificate. Supervisors together with NGOs once again assessed/filled out the NGO’s passport using the results of the training and changes in the particular organization’s development. After having the passporting completed each partner NGO received a certificate (“passport”) with assessments in two languages: English and Ukrainian.