Hi everyone! My name is Lucy and I’m One Girl’s Program Manager.
I’m in Sierra Leone at the moment on some very important business – we’ve decided that now is the time for One Girl to start looking for new partner organisations. And here’s why..
Seven months ago I travelled to Freetown to help One Girl’s local team to plan ways to expand our program activities to reach out to more girls and women in Sierra Leone. Since then our Sierra Leonean team have been doing a fantastic job of delivering scholarships to get the most vulnerable girls back in school and educating women and girls in the rural areas on how to better manage their menstruation.
After meeting with our team though, I realised that they were already working at their full capacity, and it wouldn’t be responsible of us to ask our small team in Sierra Leone to also take on school construction, small business management training and additional LaunchPad activities – which is what we now need.
Simply put, by asking them to complete all this extra work, without building their capacity and hiring new people – we’d be setting them up to fail – and given how hard we work to raise our money here in Australia (and all over the world), we knew that we couldn’t risk it.
So we looked at our options – we COULD have invested thousands and thousands of dollars into building their capacity, adding new systems, hiring people with the skills we need, and then *perhaps* they’d be able to take on the extra projects – or, to get the most ‘bang for our buck’ we could find already established partners who HAVE these skills already, and invest in them as well.
We chose the latter. Our promise to you is that we make every dollar count – and we believe this is the best way to do that.
On this trip I’m meeting with a bunch of development agencies who specialise in school construction, small business management training and health training, to find ways that we can make sure our women and girls get the services they need, without us having to invest heavily in admin.
There are hundreds if not thousands of international charities and local community organisations working in Sierra Leone – the destruction left by the recent civil war resulted in an outpouring of foreign aid that has financed some fantastic reconstruction and development programs.
This week I’ll be selecting some of the most qualified and experienced organisations to help us deliver our programs in Tonkolili and Freetown. I’ll also be investigating innovative ways of reaching out to more women and girls with our LaunchPad product (for those of you not already in the know, there’s no shame in talking about menstruation!).
The rainy season is drawing to a close and so I’m hoping not to get caught in a monsoonal downpour on my way to meetings – there’s no way my otherwise trusty umbrella would survive these conditions!
I’ll keep you posted on our progress – I’ve already met with a number of organisations who are doing GREAT work, and who we’d love to partner with.
Chat soon!
Lucy.