Initiative Update: Resilience

Firelight’s Resilience Initiative provides funding and capacity building support to 14 organizations in Tanzania and Kenya working to ensure children realize the fulfillment of their rights and their potential within a safe, caring, and protective environment.

In the summer of 2014 we solicited letters of inquiry (LOIs) from organizations in Tanzania and Kenya working on issues of child protection, child rights, and psychosocial support. We received 103 LOIs and selected 24 of the most promising organizations to submit full proposals. We were impressed and excited as we read through the submissions and learned about the unique and thoughtful sets of programming these potential partners were implementing in their communities.

Check out our most recent grants focused on education, child protection, and resilience!

In order to select the partner organizations that would form the initiative cohort, Zanele Sibanda, our Director of Programs, and Tomida Banda, our Regional Consultant, travelled to meet with the organizations’ staff and see their programs in action. This trip led to the selection of seven organizations in Tanzania, including a Lead Partner, and a Community Grantmaking organization in Kenya. This is a strong group of organizations that we’re committed to and excited about working with!

We’re tracking and measuring the outcomes of our partners’ work, and learning from it. As such, we have carefully designed a monitoring and evaluation plan for this initiative that will measure progress at the child, organization, and community levels. One of the most exciting parts of this process is an exercise by which children will identify spaces in their communities that feel safe or unsafe, which will help guide the organizations’ future programs.

Learn more about how African CBOs strengthen child protection systems in our eBook

We’ll be bringing our partners together in April for a training workshop, where organizations will have the chance to learn and share ideas around child protection and child rights programming. Watch for outcomes from this workshop in our next update!

Want to know more?

Read our Initiative Overview to learn what we're doing to protect children in Tanzania and Kenya.