One of the great ways we are able to build the capacity of our partners is through the development of financial and operational systems to enable the organisation to carry out its work more effectively.
Like any new or small business, these systems take time and require external expertise and support to develop.
We are fully committed to using our networks to be able to provide expertise and support to our partners to match the need on the ground. A great example of this has been the capacity-building project between Child Support Tanzania and ourselves aimed at building CST’s financial systems.
At the start of the year, CST identified that their financial systems were not at the level they felt they required. As the organisation expanded from running their inclusive educational centre to include the delivery of multi-year community-based projects, CST’s internal financial management systems needed to improve to manage the increasingly diverse finances of the organisation. This included their first steps into organisational management accounts and the continued development of necessary financial controls across the organisation.
Identifying a suitable professional volunteer, an initial project visit was completed to establish a relationship with the team and understand their organisational needs. Following some initial training of the financial team, we set about building the organisation’s management accounts and relevant internal financial processes. For the next year, we held monthly phone calls with CST’s finance team to support them in implementing these new financial procedures and applying their regular management accounts reporting.
The result has been massive. CST’s understanding and implementation of these financial changes have been impressive, which has made them more sustainable going forward and importantly, makes them more attractive to large donors for funding.
