Leave a comment

CENFACS’ 2020 Poverty Relief Tools

Welcome to CENFACS’ Online Diary!

15 January 2020

 

Post No. 126

 

 

The Week’s Contents

 

• Appeal to End Insecurity in the African Sahel

• CENFACS 2020 Poverty Relief Tools

• Review of Blog Readers’ and Web Visitors’ 2019 Comments

 

… and much more!

 

 

 

Key Messages

 

~ Appeal to End Insecurity in the African Sahel

 

This appeal is about asking Africans to help themselves in helping to end the insecurity situation in the African Sahel, particularly in the three-frontier area made of parts of these countries: Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.  Innocent lives have been unnecessarily taken since armed attacks and violence on civilians began last year.

The appeal is part of CENFACS’ Light Projects.  We hope through this appeal one will be able to Light up a Blaze of Hope for the innocent victims of these attacks and violence. 

CENFACS is calling to those who can to do something, especially those who have influence on the grounds to do what they can so that the peoples of African Sahel can enjoy peace and security.

To support and or enquire about this appeal, please contact CENFACS

 

 

 

~ CENFACS 2020 Poverty Relief Tools

 

As said in our last week post, we will be having new and improved tools to help reduce poverty in 2020.  This week, we are highlighting these implements.  They are a combination of skills and means designed to help us to achieve poverty reduction goal in the challenging environment of 2020.  Although, in our development calendar/planner we placed them in March 2020, some of these tools have already started.  By the time we reach March 2020, we hope that most of them would be in action. 

You can find the highlights about these tools under the Main Developments section of this post.  

 

 

 

~ Review of Blog Readers’ and Web Visitors’ 2019 Comments

 

We would like to thank and value all the comments that readers and visitors do make.  Just to let you know that we do not expect those who make the comments to please us.  We prefer they freely say what they think and feel.  Their free thoughts and feelings will support us to improve in what we are doing since we are not a perfect organisation.

We would like as well to apologise to those who made some comments and expected us to reply straightway to them, but we did not.  We receive many comments; it is always difficult to reply to each of them however worthy and sensible they may be.  This is why we seize the opportunity of the end of the year or beginning of the New Year to do a review of the comments we received throughout the ended year. 

Under the Main Developments section of this post, you will find the 2019 Review of Readers’ and Visitors’ Comments.

 

 

 

Extra Messages

 

~ All in Development Winter e-Discussion (2019-2020): Volunteering in the 2020s – Feedback

 

This is a summary of responses and reactions to the last All in Development Winter Winter e-Discussion which was held between 05 December 2019 and 05 January 2020 with a focus on Volunteering in the 2020s

The key contents of this e-discussion are as follows.

We welcome the buoyant views and comments expressed about the changing roles of volunteers at all levels of CENFACS to match the evolution of the development landscape and the needs of users.

The evolving roles include all types of tasks that individuals involved in giving their time for free, whether they are from within CENFACS (like members) or coming from outside to volunteer, will perform at various functions of CENFACS

The e-discussed ideas also revolved around the following:

Involvement of volunteers in some aspects of the 2020s programme particularly in the voluntary section of this programme; the development of steps to make voluntary work rewarding through an award-giving scheme inside or outside CENFACS; volunteering for other organisations through sub-contracting agreements; increasing volunteering budget; creating a transitional volunteering scheme to match the exiting process of the UK economy; improving digital volunteering  and its monitoring and evaluation; involving volunteers through intrapreneurship skills by giving new ideas and ways of working to help CENFACS.

The discussions went back to street fundraising and home fundraising by volunteers using online and digital technologies or people using their own devices (such as mobile phones, tablets etc.) to carry out voluntary tasks. 

There were some suggestions on the way of overseeing and monitoring this kind of way of volunteering initiatives, as well as of improving checks on street and home volunteers (such as credit score and report, criminal record checks etc.). 

To sum up, in a changing role of volunteers and in evolving development landscape  volunteers have their place to make the change that is needed in the lives of those in pressing needs.

We would like to thank everybody for their inputs; inputs that will help to improve our volunteering policy and practice while adjusting and developing our All in Development Volunteer scheme.

 

 

 

 

~ Gifts of Peace continue…

 

Our Season of Giving through the Gifts of Peace has not yet finished.  We still have almost two weeks to go until the end of this month. We are making a plea to those who have not yet managed to support to keep these gifts in their mind.

Although the deadline for the Season of Donation for these gifts is 31 January 2020, we will still accept any donations made after this deadline as there are always pressing needs that desperately request support. 

For further details about these Gifts of Peace and or to support, go to http://cenfacs.org.uk/supporting-us/  

We look forward to your support.  Thank you!

 

 

 

~ The Season of Giving continues with SHOPPING and DONATIONS at http://cenfacs.org.uk/shop/

 

Every season or every month is an opportunity to do something against poverty and hardships.  January is too a good and great month of the year to do it.

You can donate or recycle your unwanted and unneeded goods gifts you received over the festive days to CENFACS’ Charity e-Store, the shop built to help relieve poverty and hardships. 

You can as well buy second hand goods and bargain priced new items and much more. 

CENFACS’ Charity e-Store needs your support for SHOPPING and GOODS DONATIONS.

You can do something different this Season of Goods Donations by SHOPPING or DONATING GOODS at CENFACS Charity e-Store. 

You can DONATE or SHOP or do both:

√ DONATE unwanted Festive GOODS GIFTS and PRODUCTS to CENFACS Charity e-Store this January and Winter

√ SHOP at CENFACS Charity e-Store to support good and deserving causes of poverty relief this January and Winter.

Your SHOPPING and or GOODS DONATIONS will help to the Upkeep of the Nature and to reduce poverty and hardships.

This is what the Season of Giving is all about.

 

 

 

 

Main Developments

 

CENFACS 2020 Poverty Relief Tools

 

We have put together eight tools to help reduce poverty this 2020. They are as follows: CENFACS Analytics Dashboard, Mission Year/Project, Digital Accounts and Finance, Transition Leads, Advocacy for Digital Social e-Commerce or Digital Trade, Circular Economic Solutions, Reformed Services and the 2020s Programme.

 

Tool Highlights

 

Tool 1: CENFACS Analytics Dashboard

Last year, we presented CENFACS Analytics Dashboard as a management tool in what it can do to help both individuals and organisations in terms of poverty reduction as well as an implement for improving the way we are working together with them.

This year, we will be taking a further step in improving this tool so that it can be a real office assistant in our work with people and organisations. 

CENFACS Analytics Dashboard is an information management tool that tracks, analyses and displays key performance indicators, poverty relief metrics, CENFACS’ poverty relief league, etc. 

It monitors the health of CENFACS in terms of the relationships of support received to outputs and outcomes generated. 

It provides as well charts and summaries about some of the campaigns conducted. 

It finally helps to retrieve information from CENFACS repository about the resources to help users and supporters.

For more on CENFACS Analytics Dashboard, please contact CENFACS.

 

Tool 2: Mission Year/Project

A set of words that collectively define our mission, called it mission statement, can be considered as tools.  Mission can be a means by which we can realise our poverty reduction work.  Every time we refer to it, we find the value and strength that make us an organisation.  As a result, there will be a number of activities and events to carry out our Mission Year/Project

 

Tool 3: Digital Accounts and Finance

The all process of dealing or managing basic household accounts and finances is becoming more and more digital.  In order to make sure that our users and those living in poverty are not left behind in 2020 in their daily lives, tool 3 will help us to work with them to help them to better handle their household accounts, budgets and finances through digital means.  In this way, their decision making processes to reduce poverty will be in line with the realities of today’s world in which they live in, a digital world.

 

Tool 4: Transition Leads

2020 is a crunch year as it has likely become clear the UK’s intention of exiting the European economic integration model.  To be in line with this change and to move with the flow, CENFACS will be working with users on transitional (or Post-Regional Economic Integration) leads, skills and support.

A transitional needs assessment will be conducted to find out the changing and emerging needs of the community as well as new and improved tools to meet both changing and existing needs in a new setting of a transitional economy.

 

Tool 5: Advocacy for Social e-Commerce and Digital Trade

More and more Africa-based Organisations are looking ways of breaking the barriers of traditional methods of providing services as the digital world makes it possible to do it.  To enable them move in that direction, tool 5 will enable them to embrace or if they are already in to improve the social e-commerce or digital trade.  In doing so, they can use digital trade to better and more reduce poverty.

 

Tool 6: Extended Community Services Support with Circular Economic Solutions

Generally, CENFACS provides basic community support which is a package of services to help those in need.  From 2020, we are including circular economic solutions to work with those who want to reduce hardships and improve their lives through a circular economic model.  They can choose to reuse, recycle and save natural and household resources.  This will enable them to use their little money to cope or meet with other life-sustaining needs.

 

Tool 7: Reformed Services

Besides the Basic Community Support, we normally have Consume to Reduce Poverty and Bridging Financial Information Gaps as running services and activities.  These services and activities are being reformed in order to take into account the realities of today’s life, climate economy and the development of the 2020s. 

For example, in future we shall include in the Consume to Reduce Poverty and Climate Change initiative energy transition.

 

Tool 8: The 2020s Programme

Like any programme, the 2020s will contain projects, activities and a schedule of events designed to embrace the challenges of the 2020s such as a changing climate world, the realisation of the UN Agenda 2030, Africa’s Agenda 2063, the implementation of the Paris Climate Treaty, the place of the digital economy in poor people’s lives, the new UK-Africa relations or Investment framework, etc. 

Although the 2020s has not been yet launched, it will be an important tool, if not central, through which many of our work will be channelled or realised in this new decade.  It will be an exciting and poverty-relieving development that will deal with many of the questions that we may face in this new decade.  Without anticipating what it can offer, let’s wait and see until it comes to live.

The above tools are not exhaustive.  They are simply the ones we have worked out and we thought would be in demand from 2020.  As we go along this year, there could be more tools to help us help reduce poverty.

For any enquiries about these tools, please do not hesitate to contact CENFACS.

 

Review of Blog Readers’ and Web Visitors’ 2019 Comments

 

This is more than just a year in review.  We are going to tell you what blog readers and visitors of CENFACS’ Website said in 2019.  We are as well going to respond to their comments instead of just listing them.  In this respect, we could have a two-way communication, which is more engaging than a monologue. 

For the purpose of this review and responses to readers, we have selected three comments only.  Due to new data protection regulations, the identities of these readers will not be revealed.

 

What our readers and visitors said in 2019

 

First selected reader’s and visitor’s comment

The first reader and visitor made some comments about creating an e-book or guest authoring on other websites.

CENFACS’ response to this first reader and visitor

We would like to thank this reader for the comments made and their readership and visit.  We would like as well to say this.  We have already a number of readers and visitors who made the same kind of suggestions and we are open for discussions and look in depth the e-book and guest authoring proposals.  However, those who made them tend to be not contactable.  For security and data protection reasons, we need to know who we are dealing with. 

 

Second selected reader’s and visitor’s comment

This reader and visitor said that the Home page of CENFACS is kind of boring.  That we could look at Yahoo’s home page and watch how they create article headlines to grab viewers’ attention.  We could as well add a video or picture.

CENFACS’ response to this second reader and visitor

We welcome this reader’s and visitor’s comments and would like to say this.  There are many ways of improving CENFACS website.  We are aware of the impact of digital technologies can make to any organisation.  Our website does not speak about all we do.  It is just one of the other means we use to engage the public and supporters.  There are websites in the market which do not really tell their customers or public what they do or stand for, except bouncing some video clips, pictures and images.  At least, CENFACS’ website tells our readers and supporters what we do and will do, how we do it, as well as mostly what we stand for.   

 

Third selected reader’s and visitor’s comment

Our last selected reader argued that our posts are very short for starters. 

CENFACS’ response to this third reader and visitor

We value this reader and visitor comments and would to answer this.  The length of posts depends on what is going on rather than the amount of information we want the readers to have.  What is more important the substance (quality) rather than the quantity of information.  In a fast-moving world, people do not always time to read much information unless they are expert in the field or have a particular interest in the topic.  Some readers told us we provide too much information.  Others like you argue the opposite.  Briefly, it is all about the content and event that dictate the length of the post.  Thank you!

We hope the above responses will satisfy the above readers and visitors.  

However, if they need further clarification, they should not hesitate to contact us.  

Many thanks!

 

Help CENFACS keep the Poverty Relief work going in 2020.

We do our work on a very small budget and on a voluntary basis.  Making a donation will show us you value our work and support CENFACS’ work, which is currently offered as a free service. 

One could consider a recurring donation to CENFACS as a New Year’s resolution.

Donate to support CENFACS!

 

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 in the New Year and New Decade as well.

With many thanks.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *