Non-Profit

In a continent with as many competing priorities as Africa does, organisations that support socio-economic development at community level, whether in partnership or parallel to the government have a huge impact on the local communities they serve.

NGOs and other non-profit organisations play a crucial role in supporting governments to meet their obligations especially on programmes where NGOs are better placed to forge links with communities and households.

They develop organisational alternatives to State models of socio-economic intervention, particularly where such NGOs and non-profit organisations may be smaller in size, and located within local communities.

Through advocacy at different levels of the areas in which they work, non-profir organisations make a major contribution to good governance, on which so much else depends.

To be effective, non-profit organisations need to clearly determine their areas of work and develop competitive strategies for the optimisation of performance in these areas and their overall contribution to socio-economic development. These three considerations are absolutely critical for the survival of any non-profit organisation.

Apart from the need for non-profit organisations to have clear strategies for the optimisation of performance in their chosen areas of work, changing trends in aid and development assistance may in time put pressure on many non-profit organisations to reposition themselves.

Economic cooperation between China and Africa over the last twelve years, for instance, has contributed over 20% to the growth of African countries. In the ten-year period ending 2011, for example, China gave a total of USD 75B in aid to Africa.

Kenya obtained a total of USD 21.5B in aid over the same period, with USD1.4B coming from the Chinese government, USD 5.5B from the US, and USD 14.6B from the country's all other aid partner countries put together.

While Europe, America and the Scandinavia continue to give considerable amounts of aid to Africa and the rest of the world, financial pressures in the Eurozone and on the American government could, in time, significantly impact on the amount of aid that they are able to give.

This is important for non-profit organisations because in addition to the increased competition for funding that this would present, Chinese aid, which the Chinese government seems to prefer channelling though governmental partnerships rather than through NGOs and other development agencies, is also projected to grow significantly over the next few years.

Many people in the world today live in severe deficiency of health, nutrition, education, security and other basic human rights.

There are as many people, more advantaged, that genuinely want to contribute their financial and other resources to the alleviation of circumstances that lead to this situation, if only they knew how, and were sure that their contribution would be used to optimally benefit the less advantaged.

Individual donors, corporate donors, funding agencies and even governments looking to channel aid are keen to deal with non-profit organisations for who internal governance, management, accountability and operational efficiency are areas of priority.

This, especially with the increasing scarcity of aid funds, will continue to be an area that non-profit organisations need to pay special attention to.

Unlike much of commercial enterprise, non-profit organisations appeal to social development ideals, which invariably link to different economic and political interests within the communities they serve.

From this perspective, it becomes important for non-profit organisations to maintain appropriate balance between the passion to contribute to the improvement of social ideals within the communities they serve, and the need to have technically competent personnel that can effectively and efficiently undertake the work that improvement of these social ideals in reality calls for.

Non-profit organisations also want to know that they are making an impact on the ground, and this is another area that capacity building - this time of the communities they serve - makes a huge difference.

Five areas have presented convergence of interest between ourselves and non-profit organisations locally, regionally and internationally:

• International development

We offer local, regional and international development organisations and NGOs specialst support in various areas, as well as offer our complete suite of advisory services to address different requirements. See more for details on how we have worked with various aid organisations and non-profit organisations for the benefit of the communities they serve.

• Strategy

With increasing scarcity of charity funds, and a far greater scrutiny of the "value-per-dollar" spent on charity, many aid organisations have found it imperative to adopt strategic planning processes hitherto much associated with commercial enterprise. Strategy is therefore another key area in which we work with aid organisations.

• Project Assurance and Project Management

Most aid organisations, NGOs and other non-profit organisations in general are project-based, and this is what makes Project Assurance and Project Management vital areas of our work with non-profit organisations.

• Performance management

Various aid and charity organisations have found our work in performance management useful as they seek to raise the level of performance they are able to achieve.

• Learning and development

Over time, we have developed various learning and development solutions matched to specific performance requirements in non-profit organisations. Much of our work in this area draws from our broader work in learning and development, as well as from the various tailored capacity building solutions we have developed specifically for non-profit organisations.