Civil Society

Nordeco bases its work on the notion that citizens and their organisations are key to sustainable development and community resilience (e.g. towards climate change or natural disasters), through direct improvements in livelihoods, through building a local and larger networks, through participation in governance and through upholding of citizens’ rights. They are also key to management of natural and other resources. We have strongly developed concepts and experiences for how national NGOs (either consisting of professionals or farmers/villagers) develop truly programmatic approaches and combine the CS role with possible development of large-scale savings and credit or marketing mechanisms/institutions.

Nordeco partners (with advice and funds) an outstanding CS organisation in Cambodia (CEDAC), which embodies almost all the virtues of a group that works on organising poor people, improving their livelihoods and promoting participation in governance at all levels.

In our consulting activities we apply our values and experiences from this and other collaborations with Civil Society. Among our recent assignments are:

·         Capacity analysis and thematic review Danish Red Cross (2011)

·         Appraisals (five assignments) of programme proposals from ADRA-DK, Caritas-DK, WWF-DK and Danmission and capacity analysis of same organisations (2009-2010)

·         Civil Society in Environmental Sector Programme, Tanzania  (2009)

·         Evaluation of UNICEF support to NGO’s in Timor-Leste (2008)

·         Final evaluation of Joint Ethio-Danish NGO programme in North Wollo, Ethiopia (2007)

Nordeco is developing a concept for strategic monitoring of development NGOs, in view of the increasing requirements for results-based reporting. The concept aims at monitoring key CS qualities in quantitative ways and combine it with measurements of the fraction of the assistance, that reaches the field level and has meaningful effects.

We see CS-strengthening as being closely associated with our competencies in locally based monitoring and management of natural resources. Further information is found on the website: www.monitoringmatters.org