Steve Kamanzi is the chief of party of the Liberia Youth Advance Project with EDC. In the last year, he helped lead the development of an internal strategy for locally led development within EDC’s International Development Division.
Part 1 of this Q&A series focused on empowering local organizations to be the leaders in the design and implementation of development programs. In Part 2, Steve Kamanzi delves deeper into EDC’s technical approach to locally led development, explaining how EDC identifies local partners, what capacity strengthening involves, and the importance of fostering accountability .
Q1. How do you identify local organizations with a strong mission?
Kamanzi: You begin from where they are and look at what they are doing. What is their work? Youth workforce? Health? Education? You engage with the leadership of these organizations. Some of these founder-led organizations have incredible passion driving them. They might be small, perhaps only serving 25 or 50 youth, but their dedication to making an impact in their communities and growing their organizations is evident. When we provide these organizations with feedback during our initial engagement or assessment, they take it to heart and begin to change how they work in response to it.
From the inception of Youth Advance, we conducted a landscape analysis and mapping of local organizations to understand who was active and what capacities they had. The findings influenced our initial call for applications for grants and also created an opportunity to introduce the activity to the community. Many community-based and youth-led organizations, after hearing about the content Youth Advance grantees would offer to young people, came to us saying, “We may not qualify for a grant, but could we send volunteers to your trainings to learn how to provide this content to the youth we serve? We want to develop our capacities in this area so we can serve better our communities.” This became a call to innovate and adjust our delivery approach following the initial lessons.
We then invited all those small local organizations interested in participating in a wider youth-serving and youth-led organizations (YSLOs) network to an orientation to share what it would take to implement the program: what we can offer them and what they would need to commit to. Now in Liberia, we are working with more than 30 local YSLOs who are not grant funded.
Q2. How does EDC support organizations that do not receive grant funding?
Kamanzi: These organizations participate in monthly learning workshops and training-of-trainers sessions. We provide them with technical assistance on our content and approach, such as engaging the private sector, and offer opportunities to learn from other YSLOs. Because these are organizations with that heartbeat, that mission, that strong identity, they are able to take advantage of everything we can offer them and bring it back to help grow their own organizations. These organizations, although small, can provide leverage, such as training facilities and networks to the project.
In the first three years of the Youth Advance project, we have worked with more than 30 of these small organizations. Some of them eventually qualified for grants after taking advantage of the capacity development support we offered. One example of this is a disabled persons organization we worked with in Liberia. The organization did not have a grant from us; however, once we conducted the Organizational Capacity Assessment (OCA) with them, they took it upon themselves to identify their organizational gaps and started to develop tools and processes that they found they were missing.
We did something similar in Rwanda. We started by providing grants and offering capacity development support to local organizations, but many other organizations saw the value of our content and support and reached out to see how they could work with EDC. We developed specific criteria for these types of partnerships, established memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with them, and focused on meeting them where they were. Importantly, we didn’t impose any specific targets on them, allowing the organizations to grow and stay aligned with their mission.
Q. How does Youth Advance support its local grantees? What kind of capacity strengthening support do you provide?
Kamanzi: To support our local partners, we conduct OCAs and use a YSLO or local partner appraisal tool. This tool helps us evaluate several key areas, such as program preparation, delivery, monitoring and evaluation, private sector engagement, stakeholder coordination, and financial management. After the appraisal, we engage in a co-creation process with the organizations. We have found that co-creation after the appraisal process works best, as it becomes more powerful when the organization has already identified its areas of growth.
For example, in Youth Advance, we offer different pathways for youth development. Pathway 1 includes functional literacy, but not all organizations have the mission and/or capacity to provide basic education. By assessing their capacity, we can help them co-create a program. They may choose to focus on workforce readiness through Pathway 2 instead of applying for a grant under Pathway 1. Sometimes, after the assessment, an organization will realize that instead of expanding to multiple locations, they should consolidate locations to provide better services for youth. This approach ensures our partners receive tailored support aligned with their mission and capacity.
Q. How does capacity strengthening help foster accountability and sustainability among local organizations?
Kamanzi: Capacity strengthening plays a crucial role in fostering accountability. Throughout our work, we have to keep asking ourselves: Are we doing this for a funder or for EDC? Or are we doing this to genuinely improve the organizations and, in turn, the education and livelihoods of the youth in this country? What makes capacity building powerful and brings about organizational change is self-accountability and the ownership of that capacity building.
I’ve seen that organizations working with EDC, those that have deeply engaged in capacity strengthening, have really changed, developed, and taken ownership of their capacity. Through the capacity development process, these organizations become accountable to themselves—and this is locally led development. They want to make improvements, and they are not waiting for someone to come and do it for them. They take advantage of whatever resources they can to strengthen their programs and their organizations.
Locally led development requires trust, collaboration, and a shared commitment to growth. It’s not about imposing solutions but about walking alongside organizations as they identify their needs, strengthen their capacities, and take ownership of their journeys. As we’ve seen in Rwanda and Liberia, small mission-driven organizations can grow into powerful changemakers when given the right tools and support.
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