Over the past three weeks I've been very busy working as part of a team putting together a funding bid to DFID to develop the work being done by our partner organisations in northern Uganda. DFID is the UK international development agency so I was aware that I was applying for the money myself, friends and colleagues have been paying in taxes over the past few years.
The level of detail required on the budget expenditure for this bid was much greater than has been needed for UK funding bids I've worked on previously. A spreadsheet with 16 columns and a requirement for a detailed note for every line. The whole process was made much more complicated (but more worthwhile) by the fact that we work with partners so there were 12 individual budgets to prepare, one for each partner, and then consolidate onto the one form for DFID.
The partners are currently working with subsistence farmers in northern Uganda to help them to develop their farms and to use more sustainable and effective agricultural practices to produce more and better quality food for their families and communities. There is also a big element of work on land rights, agreeing land ownership, registering land rights and marking out the agreed boundaries. This has both a local element providing mediation and support to agree and demarcate land for families and a national element working with the government on land policies and registration systems.
The DFID bid is to develop this work, continuing to work with subsistence farmers but with a big element of increasing the variety of crops they grow and starting to process products for market. There are elements of developing bee keeping and honey production and training on farming as a business. The overall impact will be measured by the number of families who have more income, using 1,000,000 Ugandan Shillings per annum as the milestone, equal to approximately £250!
The whole process started with a 3 day residential workshop here in Kampala involving the bid team and all of the partners. We spent 2 days considering the beneficiaries they would work with and the activities they would do to meet the outcomes, then a final day as a budget workshop to develop their budgets to carry out the agreed activities. Then it was 18 days of hard work, including weekends, to complete and consolidate all of the information into a coherent bid for the funding.
The fun in the blog title is the social network we have out here, predominately the other international volunteers. We've had lots of evenings out, generally revolving around a meal, and I'm very thankful to all of the volunteers who've listened patiently and sympathetically to my tales of huge spreadsheets and partner budgets with circular formulae! We also had Easter and our trip away to the Murchison Falls National Park during the bid preparation period (see the previous blog post!). This looked in jeopardy at one point but the bid team insisted that I should go and they would keep the process moving. Finally the Country Director took the whole of the bid team out for dinner as a thank you for our hard work. This was much appreciated and we all had a really good evening.
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