African Rescue Committee and Approaches to Development Consultancy Ltd are pleased to present the proceedings of our October 2008 workshop, (The launching of Five Year Strategic Plan of African Rescue Committee) in order to make effective and efficient response to the increased suffering, starvation and deaths among communities badly battered by both the civil war that broke out in 1991 with the violent ouster of the bare regime and constant short-cycled ravaging famine across Somalia. Initially, when AFREC was founded, the first drive was to respond and alleviate the quasi-double tragedy of war and famine in Somalia by establishing a pilot community-based relief and rehabilitation project, preceded by informal community networking and consultation on their needs prioritization, but at this stage AFREC is planning to build its internal capacity systematically and in the mean time make a tangible intervention throughout the disaster cycle by introducing relief, recovery, rehabilitation, development as well as disaster preparedness projects at different levels.
In this Five Year Strategic Plan, AFREC will conduct 21 studies and surveys, and conduct 20 trainings for its staff and the target communities. AFREC will also introduce 12 projects and programs throughout the disaster cycle. AFREC has set up two types of budget. The first one is the Current Budget, including AFREC operations, office upgrading and enhancements, staff and community training, and Studies & needs assessments. And the second budget is the Project Budget, consisting of services, programs and projects that AFREC will support its target community in five years. The Project Budget comes under two phases, the first two years from 2009 up to 2010 and the next three years from 2011 up to 2013. The Grand Total will be US$10,890,550, of which 13.6% or a total of US$1,463,050 will be utilized as a Current Budget, while the remaining 86.4%, which is a total of US$9,427,500 will be for the Project Budget.
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Setting strategic plan for non-profit making charitable organisations, especially for those who work in the remote areas of the Horn of Africa where nothing is predictable is very difficult to model. It was also very complicated to convince donors who were willing to be of assistance to those poor societies to channel their funds through the existing civil societies, which are not feasible according to the scales of the measurement of the donors. The research question the thesis explores was if African Rescue Committee(AFREC) could achieve effective results through strategic plan. The assumption was that If African Rescue Committee set strategic plan and if that plan was endorsed by all its stakeholders, then the services it provided would have been effective and in turn built its own capacity sustainabily.
The basic underlying paradigm in the assumption was the Strategy-Structure-Performance relationship. This dissertation contributes significant enhancements to the current methodologies for designing and implementing strategic plan suitable for the illumination of the degree of accountability, transparency and credibility of such tiny non-profit making charitable organisations in order to achieve effective results that can attract all the stakeholders.
This research broadens both the connotation and the determinants of the strategic plan in an under-researched organizational context of local aid organizations such as African Rescue Committee working in the remote areas of Africa where there has not been law and order for the last 17 years, but making great achievements in many different sectors as a substitute to all public and private sector activities and services. For instance, during 2006 - 2007, AFREC implemented projects and programs costing more than US$1.3 million where more than 400,000 people has benefited in the two regions of Jubba, Somalia. For the year 2008, AFREC has secured a budget of more than US$1 million and a pledge of more than US$0.7 million which will help a total population of more than 200,000 get services and programs. AFREC made all these achievements without any sophisticated Strategic Plan, but with strong commitment and its closeness to its target community.
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The development of the five year strategic plan of AFREC came after AFREC realized the need as an essential component of its growth and maturity. Therefore AFREC approached Dr. Mahamud Ugas Muhumed who was then a PhD candidate to take his case study as AFREC. AFREC fully funded the PhD thesis of Dr.Mahamud of which the final outcome was to prepare this valuable Strategic Plan. In getting advantage of Dr.Mahamud’s research, AFREC hired him as a consultant to work with a newly established Planning Unit which will assist the consultant to compile the Strategic Plan. The five year strategic plan was developed after the team assessed both the Internal and External environment of AFREC thoroughly, and both the internal and external critical areas were founded. In developing the strategic plan, there were two areas that the research focused: The Capacity Building Basket and the Program Intervention Basket.
Setting strategic plan for non-profit making charitable organizations, especially for those who work in the remote areas of the Horn of Africa where nothing is predictable is very difficult to model. It was also very complicated to convince donors who were willing to be of assistance to those poor societies to channel their funds through the existing civil societies, which are not feasible according to the scales of the measurement of the donors, especially in Somalia where donors do not directly fund the local NGOs, because of mainly lack of government and legal institutions, which could be accountable to donors.
The information above is a sample of a recently completed plan.