Being the first of its
kind in Uganda pioneering a new grant focus on small and medium organizations
in the Central, Western, Eastern and Northern parts of Uganda, IDF’s goal in
the next five years is to transition into a highly efficient and transparent
grant making institution for small and medium-sized organizations working on
human rights and good governance issues at local level and a grant manager of
choice for funding partners aiming at enhancing protection, fulfillment and
observance of human rights and good governance in Uganda.
In the bid to achieve the
different strategic objectives stipulated in it’s strategic plan, IDF
will build upon its achievements, address highlighted challenges and also
transform into a Results-Oriented Centre for Excellence for grant making to
small and medium sized organizations pursuing human rights observance and good
governance in Uganda.
It should be noted that
the formulation of the IDF strategy is hitched on several lessons from previous
implementation and that the five year transformation of IDF will be along three
thematic lines; the clarity on IDF’s niche, scope and development goals of IDF
support-Under this IDF’s clientele will be the afore mentioned small and medium
sized CSOs (Faith based, media and Non Government organizations). They will be
serviced through technical, institutional and grants support to enhance
observance, protection and fulfillment of human rights. The second aspect of
transformation shall be the heighted focus on results and learning. These
results will be around four areas; competent and vigilant public monitoring of
human rights and governance in the community, target CSOs empowered to monitor
compliance to human rights and good governance norms and provide rapid response
to victims of violations, new frontiers for the protection and observance of
human rights at local level opened up and promoted and an efficient, effective,
transparent IDF grant making structure responsive to strategic needs. Lastly
will be institutional growth, being an institution in transition, IDF will be
creative, innovative, flexible and seek to open new frontiers through
generation of new knowledge at local levels. In the same vein will develop
performance plans to direct and focus its resources to relevant target areas.
The IDF theory of change is
that small and medium funded CSOs working at the individual, community and
district level, will be able to mobilize and bring out more cases of human
rights violations reported and attended too, knowledgeable and active
citizenry, thus further contributing to reduction of human rights violations
incidences and poor governance, local policies and systems that support the
promotion and protection of human rights and good governance. These combined
are expected to result in responsive, accountable local governments to human
needs and accountability demands by citizens and reduction of violations of
human rights in communities and households.
Cognizant of the dynamic
working environment IDF conducted a situation analysis from which it learnt of
the different limitations, existing challenges in the work of human rights and
governance and those risks that are likely to hamper the successful
implementation of it’s strategic plan; they include; low level of rights
awareness among communities, low level of primary mobilization of communities
by small and medium sized organizations, less visible public activism at the
local level, inadequate, slow out of pace response of duty bearers and of
course the internal and external challenges facing the small and medium CSOs.
As a measure several strategic interventions to these challenges have been
developed and are to be implemented along the five years journey. For instance,
IDF will invest heavily in raising public rights consciousness, pursue and
adopt collaborative approaches with partners in pursuit of its objectives to
mitigate the slow duty bearer response and adopt a facilitative yet firm stand
to ensure that all grant recipients’ projects are both relevant and honest to
community needs.
On the whole the purpose
of this plan is to ensure value addition to IDF’s work. The four value addition
areas shall include; building civic competence through “grass rooting’ human
rights and the demand for good governance among the public in Uganda
particularly the vulnerable and disadvantaged populations; to enhance community
mobilization, public activism and access to recourse/redress mechanism; and to
open up and promote new frontiers for the protection and observance of human
rights at the sub-national level.
Conclusively IDF’s
strategic plan shall provide a broad, strategic direction that will direct the
growth and set the development agenda for the next five years. And its
effective implementation shall be fundamental to the realization of the long
term vision of the National development plan of Uganda to foster a rights based
approach to national development to promote economic growth, employment and
prosperity. The same plan has been designed to contribute to the strategic
objectives of IDF’s partners.
