Welcome to CENFACS’ Online Diary!
28 August 2019
Post No. 106
The Week’s Contents
• CENFACS Annual Review 2018/2019
• Trending in Poverty Reduction in a Changing Climate, In Focus from 26/08/2019: Clothes Donation as Poverty Reducer
• All-in-one Feedback (users’ and Supporters’ Experience): Report on Reports
…. and much more!
Key Messages
~ CENFACS Annual Review 2018/2019
CENFACS Annual Review 2018/2019 is a snapshot of what we did between 1 July 2018 and 30 June 2019. As it is stated, it is neither a statutory annual report nor an annual return.
It is a summary of the year 2018/2019 in the life of CENFACS that reports back to our supporters, users and other stakeholders the impact we have made; impact through stories, quantitative and qualitative data. It is as well a performance review and annual review story of our finances.
For more on this review, please read under the Main Developments section of this post.
~ Trending in Poverty Reduction in a Changing Climate, In Focus from 26/08/2019: Clothes Donation as Poverty Reducer
The last episode in our trending series in poverty reduction in a changing climate is about the impacts that clothes donation can make on poverty reduction.
This trending activity, which is part of our Summer triple pack, deals with unwanted and unneeded clothes donated to good and deserving causes to reduce clothing poverty and other types of poverty related to clothes.
Under the Main Developments section of this post, we have given further details about this serial trending analysis.
~ All-in-one Feedback (users’ and Supporters’ Experience): Report on Reports
Last month was our Analytics month. As part of the Analytics month, we asked some of you to report or give some feedback in your words and numbers on the experiences you had about the projects and programmes we delivered in the last financial year. Some of you responded and others did not. We would like to thank those who responded.
After analysing the information you provided and looking back what happened in the last financial year, we would like to share with you some key information from the preliminary findings about your say and our look at last year’s poverty relief work.
The key news we want to share with you are as follows:
<> There will be some changes in our projects starting from Autumn 2019.
<> We will reinforce our contact and networking platforms
<> Some of the projects will disappear as they have been completed or the need has been met or even they are not any more required.
<> We will progressively introduce new projects to meet emerging and or unmet needs and demand of the community. One of them will be a new advocacy which will be about Sustainable Trajectories for the Nature.
<> We will also follow the global trade rounds to support small African traders
When these changes come into force, we shall let you know.
However, the main household brand projects making the poverty-relieving pitch at CENFACS will remain.
Please note that the above preliminary news is not the full project and programme reports neither an annual report.
Extra Messages
~ Summer Triple Pack
This pack is made of Track, Trip and Trending. While we are doing trending the other two elements (Track and Trip) of this pack continue this week. If you are engaged with the other two, please do not forget to record what you are doing.
We would like you to share if you can the shareable parts of your track and trip activities in the form of feedback.
If you have any concern about sharing, please let us know.
~ “Quandranscentennial” (Q) Challenge with 25 Life-changing projects to find
Our investigative work to find the 25 Life-changing projects within CENFACS continues this week through the Q Challenge; projects that provide the cartography of CENFACS’ poverty reduction work.
All we are asking in this Q Challenge is to search and find 25 Projects that change people’s lives. Beware, most projects can deliver good outcomes but not all of them do transform or change lives for better ones.
To take part in this CENFACS Q Challenge, please contact CENFACS.
~ Lake Chad Basin Appeal: One Year On, What Happened?
Since we launched the Lake Chad Basin Appeal last year, we are reviewing this week the progress that has been made on the grounds regarding this Basin. Our appeal was about supporting the displaced people around the Lake Chad region as a result of ongoing deadly conflict between armed militancy and predatory armies of the region.
The appeal was not an awareness-raising campaign about poverty, but it was an appeal to do something against poverty and hardships in the Lake Chad Basin.
This week, we are looking at how much has been done so far.
To discuss or share your views about the Lake Chad basin, please contact CENFACS.
Main Developments
• Annual Review 2018/2019
• • Activities Review – What Start, What Activities and What End
~ What Start
This summary covers CENFACS’ financial year 2018-2019, which we started with a July 2018 consultation of our supporters and users about what we did in the last 11 months and two weeks preceding the above financial year.
While July 2018 consultation was going on, we also held our 7 Days of Development Festival of Thoughts and Actions in July with a focus on the Effects of Trade Tariffs on Poverty Relief and Sustainable Development. The days provided us the opportunity to think that it was possible to capture the share of gain from tariff to reduce poverty and improve the state of sustainable development.
~ What Relief Activities
Every year, we dedicate the civil year to a particular theme. Since 2018 was devoted as a CENFACS’ Local People Year, we ran a Local Year campaign to that effect and most of projects and activities were framed to reflect this feature.
As most of you are aware, CENFACS’ development calendar is made of four seasons: Summer of Happiness, Autumn Fresh Start, Winter Lights and Spring Relief.
During the Summer season of Happiness, we normally run Summer programmes which are comprised of two parts: Happiness projects (Part I) and Humanitarian Relief Appeal projects (Part II) for Africa. We did the same for Summer 2018 as we appealed to the generosity of funders to relieve human suffering in Africa in four areas of children’s needs: child care giving, children’s sustainable development through sport, child poverty, child’s health and well-being, and child protection.
As to Happiness projects, we provided resources, tools, boosters, and tasters for poverty relief to help multi-dimensionally poor children, young people and families (CYPFs) build the holiday they wanted and enjoy together. To build on happiness theme, we raised the issue of climate finance and insurance for African children through what we called the financial odyssey.
The issue of happiness concerns not only children. This is why we launched an appeal to help those who lacked peace, food and water in the region of Lake Chad Basin in Africa. Since then, displaced persons and the victims of the conflicts in this basin got some peace, and access to food and water.
The end of Summer of Happiness takes us to Autumn of Freshness. Autumn give us the first act of tracking of our records related to what our users and we did during last Summer. In Autumn of Freshness 2018, we asked to our users, supporters and ourselves to report on Summer 2019 activities.
Still in Autumn 2018, we also carried out another appeal to support projects for needy people and organisations. This second type of appeal covered the following five areas of poverty relief and human development provisioning: infrastructure project, fauna and flora, people and market, hardships after summer holidays, and financial justice.
What we do as an organisation depends not only on us but also on what happens around us and in the world. In recent years, mobile money has become a common currency for some people living in poverty in Africa. Because of that, we raised awareness on the possibility of making the impacts of mobile money and financial digital inclusion on poverty reduction in Africa clearer. As a result, some our Africa-based organisations working on mobile money schemes started to produce tangible outcomes from these schemes.
As the issue of the adverse effects of climate change continued to be a matter of concern for everybody including our users, we framed our November 2018 Women and Children First Development Day to reflect this. Our development day was dedicated to women, children and the circular economy.
Without reinventing the wheels, one can agree that there are many ways of relieving poverty and one of them could be through oral tradition. To test the validity of this way of relieving poverty, we used the universal October Black History Month to research oral history of Africa. Hence, our theme for 2018 Making Memorable Difference, CENFACS’ October history project, was on Oral History. It was about how oral history helped to preserve local values, creations, dialects, cultures and customs. In doing so, alleviating local poverty and enhancing local sustainable development.
As the issue of climate change has always been at the heart of what we do as an organisation and an area of concern for us regarding its impacts on African Children, we continued to follow the global climate talks through our Climate Talks Follow-up project. In October 2018, we kept advocating a climate stake for the African children through the project CPSAC (Climate Protection and Stake for African Children), Phase 2, with Katowice Implements Paris being our climate advocacy theme.
Because of the change of the regulatory framework about data protection, we updated the Data Bank of Skills for the CENFACS Community in line with the new General Data Protection Regulations. The data bank is CENFACS’ repository of information containing the skills of the CENFACS Community.
We then ended Autumn of Freshness 2018 with the integration of financial literacy skills and digital literacy skills to tackle poverty induced by the lack of these skills and banking eligibility criteria.
Generally, we end the civil year (here 2018) with two types of projects: a project of celebration to end the civil year (2018) and a planning project to prepare the new civil year (2019). Our project of preparation for the start of 2018 was Winter e-discussion on Volunteering in a New Climate Economy.
To celebrate the end of year 2018, we took our skills project further miles to acknowledge CENFACS as a charitable organisation that is a community of skilled people as well. As such, we acknowledged our known and hidden individual skills to reduce poverty. Our individual skills put together become a Community of Skilled People – the CENFACS Community. We celebrated this distinctive feature of in our project of celebration at the end of 2018.
These preparation and celebration initiatives helped us to enter Winter Lights season.
Being an advice-giving organisation, this puts us in a position to know the community’s needs. We provide advisory help to our project beneficiaries on ways of building and boosting income to reduce income poverty. This is what we did at the start of Winter Lights.
Additionally, sharing skills and knowledge on ways of consuming sustainably, responsibly and economically to save the environment and money as well as reducing poverty linked to bad consumption decisions and induced by climate change was part of our work around December 2018 and January 2019 Festive seasons. The focus was then on anti-pollution consumption.
To highlight the issue of sustainable consumption, the 62nd Issue of CENFACS’ newsletter (FACS) focused on ways of creating and sustaining agricultural markets for African small scale farmers and farm produce in 2019 and beyond. While we were trying to deal with agricultural markets, we did not stop to use our new media programme the IT and online security issues to reduce poverty as part our digital and social media campaign.
To mark the Winter Lights season in full swing, we brought and lighted a Blaze of Hope for the Children Victims of Conflicts in the Central African Republic and Region of Africa. The appeal was aiming at making the Central African Republic a normal place for children to live, grow and stay.
Rebuilding Africa is another area of operation. As 2019 has been the year of unprecedented elections and democratic transitions we set up a new transitional development programme to work with our Africa-based Sister Organisations in places moving from instability (abnormality) to stability (normality). As a result, we launched another DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) appeal for sustainable peace, rebuilding infrastructures and lives.
Having seen what was happening in the Central African Republic with children suffering, we advocated for the Halving of Child Poverty by Halving the Number of Children War Victims through the Halving Poverty campaign. The history of CENFACS’ work for the protection, well-being and welfare of African Children and other children is a long standing one. You also know that CENFACS is a resilient advocate of the causes of CYPFs in various programmes, projects, processes and settings of development and poverty relief.
As we saw the pain that children were having in places of war and climate change (like the Central African Republic), we started to search for new forms of data to understand what was happening. Our ACCSDGs (African Children, Climate and Sustainable Development Goals) or 3G project focused on finding new forms of data to see if the children living in those places were meeting these goals.
The crisis in North Africa continued to make the lives of ordinary North Africans difficult even impossible whilst the pressing needs to reduce poverty were become self-evident, it appeared self-explanatory for us to make a special Spring 2018 appeal for peace in Algeria with hope for a peaceful transition to political democratisation processes.
Since 2019 is the year end of our Twenty-tens Programme (2009-2019), it did make sense to review it and start the conversations about a new programme (that is, the Twenty-twenties programme) for the coming decade.
April 2019 was dedicated at CENFACS as the Month of Protections as usual. In this respect, our April 2019 Reflection Day reflected on this dedication by focusing on the Protection of Women and Children in Places of War-torn Zones and Natural Disaster-stricken Areas.
To keep momentum with our rebuilding work, the theme for our May 2019 project of Development Stories Telling – All in Development Volunteers’ Stories – was about Life-renewing Stories. Likewise, we kept recalling for the rebuilding of forest protection in the DRC.
~ What end
Like any other organisation, we create. We do it all over the year but June is the month we acknowledge our Creations and activities around them. To put this into practice and perspectives, we ran activities about creation and innovation in the context of economic uncertainty. Our project of Art and Design for poverty reduction and sustainable development also added value to the creation month. Centre staging climate issues in our mobilisation campaign – the World Anti-Poverty System or the International System for Poverty Relief – was another addition.
June 2019 was once more about CENFACS as a sustainable creation together with people making and thriving our community. Together we thought about ways of Preserving Sustainable Creations. This last act concluded our financial year 2018-2019. All in all, we launched four major seasonal fundraising campaigns (in Summer and Autumn 2018, and in Winter and Spring 2019), six humanitarian relief appeals; and we requested two reports (an overall Summer-of-Happiness report covering the first season of CENFACS’ development calendar and an All-in-One feedback covering the entire preceding financial year).
• • Achievements
We would be indebted if we end this review without mentioning or adding to the above work carried out these three achievements (historical, digital and analytical):
1/ Historical achievement: the celebration of the 25 years of the idea of CENFACS since it was created in 1994; celebration done through the “Quadranscentennial” Project. The five “Quadranscentennial” Acts that we presented in our previous online communications or posts clearly explain this historical achievement.
2/ Digital achievement: Setting up an Online e-charity Store for people to donate goods and shop to help reduce poverty and enhance sustainable development. Although, there is still much to be done to make this e-store fully functioning, it is nevertheless an opportunity to change poor lives for a better one.
3/ Analytical achievement: CENFACS’ Analytics Dashboard is a real management tool to help Africa-based organisations to improve on the way they are trying to help reduce poverty. It is also a supportive control panel that can help them to boost their skills, increase awareness of their work, and win more and better support from funders and grant makers.
• • Performance review
In terms of our performance this year, we would like to let you know that our cash funds continue their positive trend. This year, there has been a decrease in both our receipts and payments reflecting the uncertainty and transition in the economy. This decrease did not stop us to increase our cash by 22%. This upwards trend of cash means that we are continuing to meet our key performance targets and indicators. In this respect, we can point out that our performance is getting better.
• • Thank you
The work of CENFACS is a collective endeavour that relies upon the voluntary contribution of others, a key to our success. As such, there is a number of people and organisations who contributed to the realisation of our financial year 2018-2019.
We would like to indiscriminately acknowledge them. Without their helpful support, we would not be able to achieve the above. We are grateful to our volunteers, users, website/blog readers and supporters.
Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge those who posted their comments and responded to our advocacy appeals and other development campaigns.
We would like to thank all of them for their unwavering commitment and impactful support for helping us to voice and bring once again our poverty reduction message into the world in development.
Many thanks for making 2018-2019 another deservingly memorable year at CENFACS.
• Trending in Poverty Reduction in a Changing Climate, In Focus from 26/08/2019: Clothes Donation as Poverty Reducer
Clothes donation goes far beyond the simple giving of clothes which can be given to those in clothing need or to be sold to raise money to reduce poverty and hardships. Clothes donation can have some implication for other types of poverty as follows.
~ Clothes donation and types of poverty
Clothes donation can have connotations with
<> Poverty linked to deforestation induced by the production of cotton for the textile industries
<> Poverty created by factories using poor cheap labour and exploiting poor people while paying low wages
<> Clothes poverty gap featured by the seemly extra supply of clothes over their demand, which needs to be resolved through the redistribution of this extra
<> Poverty related to the adverse impacts of climate change
However, clothes donation should not be seen as an end to poverty reduction. It is just a way amongst the many ones to help reduce poverty and hardships.
Going beyond the simple relationships between clothes donation and poverty reducer can mean as well considering the changing climate.
~ Clothes donation as poverty reducer in a changing climate
Our theme of changing climate can apply to clothes donation in its relationship with poverty reduction. As explained above, clothes donation can help reduce poverty (by giving donated and or selling clothes donated).
Clothes donation can as well deal with the issue of changing climate. A changing climate can force humans to cloth differently to suit the weather and health; but also to reduce pressure on the environment by using more raw materials such as cotton.
To follow this trend with CENFACS, please let us know.
FOR ONLY £1, YOU CAN SUPPORT CENFACS AND CENFACS’ PROJECTS, JUST GO TO http://cenfacs.org.uk/supporting-us/
Thank you for visiting CENFACS website and reading this post.
Thank you as well to those who made or make comments about our weekly posts.
We look forward to receiving your regular visits and continuing support throughout 2019.
With many thanks.
