Global Grant Finance Community: Feb 2018 Newsletter
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to 2018 from all the team at the African Academy of Sciences.
GFGP standard.
The 2nd Technical Harmonisation Committee meeting to review the Committee Draft (CD) of the GFGP standard will be held in Nairobi from the 7th to 9th February. Despite all the editorial work on the standard, the GFGP team still manged to find ~ 70 minor editorial errors which we have submitted to ARSO for consideration at the THC meeting.
Following the 2nd THC meeting the next draft of the standard should be available in mid Feb’18 when it will start a 60 day period of public consultation. We will provide you with access to this next draft via a drop box link.
If all goes to plan, the final version of the standard should be ready for balloting and adoption as a new pan African standard, hopefully coincident with the ARSO Annual General Assembly which will be held in w/c 18th June 2018.
GFGP Alpha Portal assessment system.
In January 18, the AAS/GFGP team undertook the first GFGP compliance assessment site visit, of a fairly large research institution, in continental Africa. The purpose of the visit was to review this particular grantees’ responses to the requirements of the standard. During the visit we learnt many lessons which we shall take forward into the design of the beta version of the portal and improvements to the standard.
As was mentioned in the Dec’17 newsletter, the AAS would like to encourage the GFGP community to try out the alpha2 version of the assessment portal. If, either as a grantor or a grantee, you wish to get involved, please contact the team at gfgpcommunityportal@aasciences.ac.ke. who will administer your registration. Your comments on this prototype assessment system would be most welcome.
In order to assess the functionality of the GFGP standard and the assessment portal in Bronze and Silver tier organisations we have started some testing in small CSO’s/CBO’s in urban and rural Kenya. The chosen organizations operate in the humanitarian, water & sanitation, educational, civil and gender equality sectors. Preliminary findings have been very encouraging in that regardless of size of organization the tiered structure of the standard permits flexibility to accommodate the requirements of a wide range of organizations.
GFGP Beta Portal assessment system.
Development of the beta and launch versions of the portal has been commissioned and the beta version should be available for testing in early April. We are planning some workshops to be held between the 9th and 20th April. The provisional timetable is to hold workshops in Eastern ( 9th & 10th April), Western (12th & 13th April) and Southern Africa (16th & 17th April). The outline format for the workshops will be a 2 day meeting in which we will a) review the standard, b) test the beta portal and c) have some open sessions to brainstorm the next opportunities you would like to see developed to support GFGP.
The GFGP program has funds to pay the travel and subsistence costs for a small number of grantees who attended the original GFGP workshops held in Jan & Feb 16. If any of these grantees are interested in attending the workshops in April then please send us an email as soon as possible to gfgpcommunityportal@aasciences.ac.ke to register your interest.
If any grantors wish to attend, or wish to sponsor the travel and subsistence costs of any of their grantees to attend then please let us know. Early expressions of interest ( to the same email address as above) from grantors and grantees interested in attending the workshops will help us plan the size of the venue we need to arrange.
We also intend to hold two, one day, workshops in London, which will be primarily for the grantor community. The preliminary dates for these workshops are the 23rd and 24th April. Early expressions of interest from grantors to attend the London workshops is also requested.
The purpose of all these workshops is to enable the GFGP team to maximise input from the grantee and grantor community as we finalize the standard and the functionality of the launch version of the assessment portal.
We will confirm the dates and venues for the workshops in the next newsletter.
Kind regards
The GFGP team.
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