Supporting Inclusive Governance: Update from our strategy implementation in Ghana and Senegal
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Hewlett Foundation’s Gender Equity and Governance (GEG) program supports a diverse set of creative thinkers and problem solvers who are working to build an inclusive society where everyone, especially women and girls, can thrive.
In April 2022, the GEG program launched our Inclusive Governance (IG) strategy. Since then, we focused our efforts on implementing the “new” strategy through grantmaking and “beyond the grant dollar” engagements that included multiple country visits, publication of blogs and interviews, hosting and attending convenings, facilitating collaborations between our partners, etc. Most importantly, in-between the strategy launch and the implementation activities, we have developed what we commonly call “Country Implementation Plans”. This blog shares the findings of the Country Implementation Plans for Ghana and Senegal, the way we’ll use them and what’s coming next for the IG strategy. A similar blog focused on our work in Kenya and Mexico will be published later this year.
Country Implementation Plans: What do they stand for?
A crucial aspect of our strategy involved the development of country implementation plans — a tailored approach to contextualize the theory of change to the needs, challenges and opportunities unique to each country. Right after the launch of the IG strategy, we commissioned consultancies in each of our four priority countries — Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, and Senegal[1]. The scope of work has been to gather relevant background information per country and then co-create the Country Implementation Plans with our team. With our aim to shift more resources and power to those countries, we thought it might be contradictory to the Hewlett Foundation’s values and guiding principles to implement an overarching strategy that has been mainly coordinated from our office in Menlo Park, no matter how inclusive the design process of the strategy had been. So, we partnered with local consultants who engaged directly with the proximate changemakers and voices to help produce the four Country Implementation Plans.
First, we worked collaboratively with our consulting partners to gather some background information per country, to answer questions such as the following: Which population or populations have been historically marginalized or underserved in each country? How responsive are the country governments to the needs and aspirations of these populations? Why? What are the prevailing gendered norms and power dynamics at play? How do underserved populations currently express their needs and aspirations in each of the countries? What movements, coalitions, fora exist? Which are utilized? Then, the consultants supported us in mapping the existing actors, including peer funders, current grantee partners, and potential grantee partners; where are the opportunities for partnership and how are all these actors organized at the global, national and sub-national levels.
Finally, based on the answers to the above questions, we co-developed Country Implementation Plans of the IG strategy that depict what change we can realistically contribute to in a five year timeframe given the country specificities and our grantmaking budget, what types of partnerships we might consider continue supporting or developing over time and with what level of resourcing, what would success look like in each country and what are the country-specific risks and our mitigation strategies.
What did the Country Implementation Plans reveal?
The four Country Implementation Plans have each provided detailed orientations on how, what, where and who to fund in each of our priority countries. However, we do not intend to use this information as grantmaking dogma. Rather, we’ll use it as loose and flexible guidelines to inform our decision-making processes and identify new partnerships or continue existing ones that contribute to advance our shared goals.
In Ghana, six main groups were identified as historically underserved. These groups overlap intersectionally as they sit at a confluence of many exclusion factors including social inequalities, geographic locations, structural and political context, and power relations. The underserved groups that were identified include peasant/smallholder farmers, market women, rural women, youth, people with disabilities (PwDs) and fulani ethnic group. In addition, the Ghana Country Implementation Plan revealed interesting opportunities for Hewlett’s IG team such as partnering with local philanthropic initiatives to coordinate long-term support to emerging organizations and movements, strengthening locally based regranting and capacity-building organizations to support small and local organizations across the country, support key moments and meeting spaces that draw national attention to the needs and aspirations of underserved populations, and coordinating with relevant donors on co-funding opportunities to support similar issues in some of the poorest areas in the Northern parts of the country.
In Senegal, the historically underserved populations identified by our consulting partners are mainly located in the border and landlocked parts of rural areas and the large suburbs around the capital city Dakar. They are mainly: peasants/smallholder farmers, poor and landless rural women, persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities in the southern and eastern regions of the country, displaced groups in the conflict zones in the southern regions and former repatriates from Mauritania in the northern regions, and sex workers. in addition to identifying grantmaking criteria that would help us reach the most relevant potential grantees, our consulting partners in Senegal have found great opportunities in organizational and institutional strengthening of CSOs and coalitions, promoting local initiatives in favor of underserved populations, building the capacities of independent and pluralistic media including community radios, strengthening collaboration between the media and underserved populations, and developing participatory and consultative mechanisms on public policies at subnational level to help increase accessibility of underserved populations to key government information.
What does implementation look like?
Here are a few examples — among many more — of how the Country Implementation Plans in Ghana and Senegal inform the way we balance our grantmaking between the different intermediary goals (outcomes) of the IG strategy to promote the efforts of underserved populations in making government more responsive to their needs.
In Ghana, we already had a strong portfolio of partner organizations working on use of information , including CDD-Ghana, Advocates for Community Alternatives (ACA), and the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition. Similarly, we made significant progress toward supporting pluralistic and independent media through our partnership with the Media Foundation for West Africa. However, we’ve had limited and time-bound experience supporting grassroots advocacy movements through the IAmAware campaign and the pilot work of ACA in Donkro Nkwanta. Now, through our partnership with STAR-Ghana Foundation, we contribute to increasing the resilience and resourcing of movements, coalitions, and membership organizations to address systemic constraints to underserved communities’ access to quality public goods and services. In the Northern region of the country, our new partner Norsaac and its allies are fostering advocacy on youth and women representation and voice in governance processes and structures, including in rural areas.
In Senegal, our long-lasting partner ONG-3D improved citizens’ access to national budget information and experimented mechanisms for citizen engagement in local government processes. While we diversify and deepen our footprint in marginalized groups’ participation to local economic governance in Senegal in partnership with ALPHADEV, Enda ECOPOP, Y’en a Marre and CAJUST; we have started strengthening capacities of community radios with URAC to create spaces for inclusive dialogue between underserved communities and local policymakers. Our intermediary partner IBP-Senegal is now supporting social movements and coalitions to achieve their vision of ensuring that fiscal governance and service delivery systems are more inclusive, responsive, and accountable to the needs of historically excluded groups, especially women and girls.
What’s next?
Now that we are wrapping up year two of the IG strategy implementation, we have started seeking consultants to support us develop and implement a Progress, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (PEAL) plan for all levels of the strategy’s work, including the global, Africa regional, and country levels. Specifically, the consultant will facilitate the co-creation of a strategy-wide PEAL approach; develop country-specific indicators and narratives of change based on inputs from the grantees and manage PEAL data collection process and collect inputs, including from current grantees at the country level, and gather data for initial baselines. This information would later help us make informed decisions and adjust course as needed. By end of February this year, we are expecting to extend a contract to our selected PEAL consultant and start reaching out to our grantees and partners for insights and collaboration.
As always, please, reach out if you want to learn more about our Country Implementation Plans or have any questions for us.
Ousseynou Ngom, Program Officer, Gender Equity and Governance, Hewlett Foundation
