An integral part of the Transformative Alliance project, AppInnov is a new fund with a budget of €60,000 that aims to support the development of expertise among members of the Rights and Health Alliance network and their partners in women's and youth CSOs in their context on change-oriented approaches (COA) and the capitalization of experiences. Through methodological experiments carried out as part of projects promoting transformation in favor of gender equality, youth, and ecology, it contributes to the internal dynamics of mutual reinforcement and innovation within the network and the co-construction of inclusive governance spaces.
This fund is part of an experimental program benefiting from methodological support from F3E.
A structuring fund for the Transformative Alliance project
The Transformative Alliance project aims to support the transformative power of collective civil society movements. It supports the participation of the network and its associations in strategic spaces so that they can develop their social mobilization and political dialogue actions. The objectives are to accelerate progress in sexual and reproductive health and rights for women and girls, and to make the network and its member associations leaders in SRHR in the region by ensuring that their expertise and knowledge are shared internally and externally.
This transformative dynamic is based on a strategy of supporting the organizational and technical development of the network's members and the production and circulation of knowledge within the network to assert its leadership on SRHR issues for women and girls in West Africa.
An important part of the network's collective empowerment also involves strengthening methodological tools for change-oriented approaches (COAs) and capitalizing on experiences. Through this circularity of expertise, the aim is to strengthen internal capacities to meet the constant challenge of measuring change, adjusting monitoring and evaluation approaches, and formalizing lessons learned from the implementation of complex and transformative projects.
The previous phases of this project enabled Alliance network members to familiarize themselves with CAs and the capitalization of experiences during the implementation of Change Lab projects (2018-2021): training, support and advice, data collection and analysis workshops, etc. The experiments raised a number of questions about an approach that is still being adapted. Beyond certain methodological pitfalls, the AOC philosophy has nevertheless been able to respond to strong concerns about monitoring that empowers young people, promotes dialogue and mutual learning, and highlights the effects and changes among actors. Numerous tools and facilitation materials have been developed for this purpose, and several people from member organizations have become AOC ambassadors. This fund is therefore a continuation of this mutual learning dynamic, providing the financial and technical support necessary for the collective appropriation of these change-making approaches.
Peer support as a lever for guidance
This fund, supported by AFD, has a budget of€60,000, divided equally among the country alliances (i.e., €12,000 allocated to each of the five eligible country alliances: Burkina Faso, Senegal, Niger, Côte d'Ivoire, and Benin) in accordance with the principle of non-competition advocated by the network.
Methodological support takes different forms depending on needs: capitalization and dissemination of an innovation, experimentation with a monitoring and empowerment approach, deployment of an AOC mechanism on a project with transformative potential.
In concrete terms, this takes the form of internal, peer-to-peer support through support teams made up of resource persons who are members of the network and who contribute their varied expertise (such as gender, SRHR, AOCs, and capitalization, etc.) to support the implementation of experiments, HR budgeted for the implementation of experiments, and learning activities(training, peer exchange visits, communities of practice, etc.).
The objectives of this fund are as follows:
→ For organizations
- Support learning dynamics within network organizations and their partners by creating leverage.
- Facilitate the adoption of AOCs and approaches that promote social change in favor of gender and youth integration.
- Include members' contributions in empowerment and social transformation initiatives.
- Contribute to the process of organizational empowerment of the network's working partners (women's and youth CSOs), who are often confined to the role of beneficiaries.
- Respond to their needs for methodological reinforcement on AOCs, capitalization, and through their effective participation in the governance of the fund.
- Develop the network's expertise in AOCs through the sharing of internal and external expertise.
Five country projects were submitted in February to the evaluation committee, composed of members of the alliance's board, capitalization experts, and AOC members of the network. This proposal evaluation phase follows two key activities organized in November 2023: the launch of the fund's call for proposals and the workshop on inclusive governance.
Support teams of two to four volunteers, members of this committee, were then formed to support the country experiments.
The process continues with a meeting phase between March and early April 2024 with the bidding country alliances to create a support framework tailored to the specificities of each project.
