By Amadou Manjang
The Association of Non-Governmental Organisations(TANGO) with funding from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and in collaboration with Network against Gender Based-violence and ActionAid International The Gambia, kicked off Monitoring & Evaluation and Report Writing training under the Gender Promotion Initiative 2.0 Project.
The event was held in SINDOLA, Kanilai on Monday.
The six-day training is geared towards building the capacity of the twenty-two Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in the Gambia on project monitoring, evaluation, and report writing with the expectation to fill the existing capacity gaps. However, the project is for three years.
The Gender Promotion Initiative 2.0 Project is part of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 on women and peace and security that reaffirms the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peace building, peacekeeping, humanitarian response and post-conflict reconstruction. It also stresses the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security.
The Gambia is the first selected country in Africa for the project. The selected CSOs participating in the training are from West Coast Region, Lower River Region, and Upper River Region; each organisation has two representatives making the total of participants forty-four.
Dr. Ipoade Omilaju, the Institutional Capacity Building Specialist and the Team Lead of the Project, said the project is to build the capacity of CSOs and enhance networking among them. He added that the training is organised after finding capacity gaps in CSOs monitoring, evaluation, and report writing.
‘Therefore, this training is to fill the capacity gap we found during last year’s assessment report about the CSOs. We want to fill this gap by providing technical support to the CSOs,’ he said.
According to him, the monitoring and evaluation are relevant to strengthening the CSOs in the Gambia. He further added that this training will be followed by Mentor Approach training where the organisations will be assessed to know their weaknesses and then provide peer-to-peer mentoring to assist one another.
The Project Manager, Bridget Tabou Correa, said most of the organisations do not have proper structures, resource mobilisation skills, or good governance structures, therefore, the training is expected to raise their capacity level in such areas.
‘We couldn’t work with them without assessing them, which we did last year,’ she said, ” this training now will fill the gap and turn their weakness into opportunity.’
She further said that the training was not part of the project design, but they have included it to promote the project after finding out the low capacity level among the organisations.
‘This is a push for them to move from one stage to another. This will get things moving in the right direction.’
Amie Touray, the Project Focal Person from TANGO, told participants during the opening ceremony to participate as much as possible because it is only through effective participation that they could utilize the benefit of the training. She urged the participants to take the training seriously.
