Small Grants

So much has happened in the past 10 days, I need to get up to date so I can tell you about some of the cool stuff I’ve been doing here. Get ready for a bunch of posts at once…

The week of October 20-23 was pretty quiet and uneventful. I was asked to sit on the objective review panel for Zambia’s USG small grants program. This is a section of PEPFAR money that comes to the country designated for short projects that don’t require a lot of funding to complete. Zambia has decided to fund all of their Orphans and Vulnerable Children projects through this mechanism. Because I needed to read through about 30 applications in 4 days, I cancelled plans here and there to spend more time reading through the applications. It made for some lonely nights in the hotel, but I was happy for the academic exercise.

The whole process was sort of like grading papers. But instead, I was evaluating components of a project proposal and scoring them accordingly. All applications were not created equal and there were times I had to take breaks to make sure that I was maintaining objectivity. If just gets tough to read after a while because the need for service is so great. Most of the programs aimed to paying for school fees and uniforms for children that had lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS. FYI – the term ‘orphan’ in these types of programs means a child that lost one parent. A double orphan is a child that has lost both parents.

Anyway, these projects look to ease the burden to the extended family for children who no longer have parents to support them. Good applications were those that partnered with health services, provided counseling for emotional issues, and targeted at least 50 percent girls. While many strides have been made in empowering women, in many cases female children are still valued less than males. One of the ways to correct this is via completed primary and secondary education. If you educate women, they are much more likely to become leaders in their community and reinvest their talents, thus working to end the cycle of poverty.

I’m reading Three Cups of Tea at the moment and it speaks to the importance of the education of girls. (Yes, this is my second shameless plug for this book. Go read it!) Reading a book like that while working in a developing country makes it all the more vivid. It was a good choice for the trip.

Moving on...a few other random funny things about reading these applications:
1) Love it when people don't know English slang terms and develop acronyms. There was one organization that named themselves the Development Organizations for Peoples Empowerment or DOPE. And yes, they called themselves DOPE throughout the application. (Although their name had no bearing on their score. :)

2) There are several programs hope to generate their own income by breeding and selling various types of livestock. I love it when they say they can afford anti-biotics for the chickens, but not the children. (yes, they did loose points for that.)

So small grant review was a good experience, but I'm glad serving on objective review panels is not a large component of my day job. It's tough and tedious!