Learning meaningful ways to tell the stories that guide our work

This means we:

  1. Develop partnerships based on a shared understanding of the violence and exploitation women and girls experience and what this means for our ways of working and being;
  2. Facilitate the empowerment of women and girls so they can share their stories;
  3. Analyze stories to develop solutions and build coalitions for change;
  4. Share our organizational learning on key issues (e.g. service user participation, advocacy);
  5. Amplify feminist action by sustaining and developing ourselves (e.g. financially, stress and trauma-informed, adhering to standards for working with vulnerable groups).

The realities we imagine from this capacity building are:

A sustained and strong network of government, civil society and community stakeholders creating a safe and enabling environment to address the violence and exploitation of women and girls.

 

WAVES’ Organizational Development Goals

For WAVES to become better able to meet their programmatic goals and become a more effective player in the process of empowering women, ensuring justice for them and alleviating poverty, the following organization development goals have been set to bring WAVES to speed with its new long-term strategic plan: – 

  1. Strong financial and human resource base
  2. New strategic partnerships (supporting long term Programs) and strengthening existing ones.
  3. Establish WAVES as a learning organization

Empowering our people

The broad strategies WAVES will use to achieve their organization development goals include:

  • Staff capacity building
  • Systems development: M&E, Human Resource Management, GESI sensitive programing, Project Sustainability through people centered Cycle Management (PCM) and reporting
  • Strengthening the culture within WAVES to emphasize a learning culture

Our guiding principles

We have an appreciative, African feminist approach to capacity building. This means we:

  • Set the parameters of capacity-building in ways that are meaningful and useful to us
  • Draw from our lived experience/realities and that of our service users
  • Focus our capacity-building on existing areas of strength (partnerships, collaboration and coalition-building; Programming, communication and advocacy; vision, mission and values)
  • Understand that by focusing on areas of strength, we transform areas of weakness
  • Know that effective capacity-building is done by and with us; not ‘to’ or ‘for’ us
  • Define feminist action in ways that are relevant to us, our mission and strategies
  • Recognize and resist all systems of oppression experienced by women and girls (e.g. patriarchy, colonialism, racism, ageism and Eurocentrism)

 

WAVES strategies to meet the Organizational development goals:

Strategies for Goal 1: Strong financial and human resource base: –

    • Upgrading financial and administrative systems including procurement procedures so that they function more effectively, ensuring they both support program work and provide accountability for WAVES’ partners
    • Staff development and capacity building program, to establish core competencies to enable staff to carry out their work more effectively, in a GESI and women’s right focused way – this process will be guided by the skills audit outcomes
    • Build staff capability and work planning system to work in an integrated way across the two thematic areas.

Strategies for Goal 2: New strategic partnerships and strengthening existing ones: –

    • Circulation of the new five-year strategic plan more widely amongst old, current and new partner organizations, encourage current partners to act as connectors to new potential funding organizations
    • Engage with potential new strategic partners, through meetings, submit proposals to new donors, circulate monitoring and project reports to wider network of organizations.
    • Have current partners introduce you to other likeminded funding organizations with their strong recommendations with respect to WAVES capacity to deliver and create impact

Strategies for Goal 3: WAVES as a learning organization: –

    • Development of the MEL (Monitoring, Evaluations and Learning) system into an ‘impact and lesson learning monitoring system’
    • Develop a ‘culture of learning’ within WAVES – draw lessons from mistakes, failure and successes at all times
    • Build staff capabilities to integrate lessons learnt into their program work
    • Re-orientate staff management processes, supervision and work planning to include reflection on lessons learnt and practical ways for feeding lessons into ways of working and program plans.