Zambia
In 2023, Global Communities served as the institutional capacity strengthening partner to Project Concern Zambia (PCZ) and its three local sub-grantees on the Empowered Children and Adolescents Program (ECAP II) funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) with support from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
The goal of the program, which runs until 2025, is to mitigate the impact of HIV and improve the health and well-being of vulnerable children and adolescents (VCA) across two provinces in Zambia (Central and Southern). ECAP II is PCZ’s first award as a prime implementer, following an intentional process by Global Communities to transition our Zambia branch office to an independent, locally registered entity governed and managed by Zambians.
Under ECAP II, Global Communities worked to strengthen the ability of both PCZ and the project’s consortium to improve and expand service delivery while managing new and increased resources effectively. This included providing project oversight and supporting PCZ with developing and implementing strong internal systems, policies and procedures to ensure sound financial management and compliance across the consortium.
Key activities included conducting Organization Capacity Assessments for PCZ and all ECAP II sub-grantees. Using the assessment results, we supported the partners with identifying opportunities for organization change, learning and development across 10 technical and programmatic domains.
Global Communities also supported PCZ with resource mobilization, business sustainability and development efforts, including the coordination of a Business Planning and Resource Mobilization workshop. Topics included business planning, communications and branding, proposal development and budgeting as well as private sector mapping and engagement. The workshop enabled PCZ to identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats while updating the organization’s sustainability plan to reflect learning from the workshop.
Additionally, as part of ECAP II’s household economic strengthening interventions, Global Communities provided technical assistance to PCZ in rolling out a program that helps households caring for more than 24,000 vulnerable children and adolescents to form and/or strengthen savings groups. The program draws on Global Communities’ innovative Women Empowered (WE) methodology, so we provided virtual and in-person trainings to PCZ staff and community facilitators on training of trainers, mobile data collection and improving the quality of WE groups. By the end of fiscal year 2023, community facilitators supported the formation of 561 WE groups with a total membership of 14,201 women and men. This exceeded the project’s target for number of WE groups by 153%.