Interview with Nafi Chinery (AWDF) Full Transcript:
My name is Nafi Chinery. I’m Ghanaian and I work for the African Women's Development Fund.
What does your organisation do?
Based in Accra the African Women's Development Fund (AWDF) is a pan African feminist organisation working for the promotion of women’s rights across Africa. So we are grant makers, we fundraise, we use information to promote women’s rights in Africa.
How has ACBF had a positive impact on your organisation?
The grant, actually has helped AWDF a lot. It is the first grant that we received from a donor that is looking at three different things which is seeking to build an institution which is the African Women's Development Fund and for me it is quite unique; If a look at the portfolio of the ACBF I can say that AWDF is unique, because it’s a feminist organisation, it is the only organisation which is a grant maker that supports only women rights work on the continent of Africa and it’s the only organisation that operates in 42 African countries and works with over 1000 grantees, not to talk about the many women in the communities and in the countries that we touch , so the fund or the grant that we received from ACBF has actually improved our capacity to be able to touch all those lives and to influence spaces, that’s spaces that shape women’s development on the continent . The grant that we got in our first phase one for example, was an accelerator to receive a grant from the Dutch government, it was called the MDG fund in 2008 and AWDF was a recipient of the largest grant, which was 5 million Euro and what we did in that application was that we used our relationship with ACBF , that we know how to manage grants, we are managing grants from ACBF which is this much to be able to do this work and that gave us a leverage, an advantage over many organisations and because of our partnership with ACBF we have improved our systems and structures in AWDF for example we strengthen our M & E, we strengthened our grant making system because we have, we receive different types of training from ACBF, each time they come on mission and they invite us to training; so we improved and we were able to articulate that clearly in our application to the Dutch government for the flow funds so we were the highest recipients for that grant which was 5 million Euro, and that was because, among other factors our relationship with ACBF
