ACCESS
Australian Community Development
and Civil Society Strengthening Scheme
The primary goal of this new AusAID project is to alleviate poverty
by providing assistance to empower communities and civil society. ACCESS
will focus on making communities stronger making them better able to plan
and implement activities themselves.
Support will be provided through NGOs. The project will provide capacity
building support for NGOs so that they can better assist communities
plan for their own future. NGOs are partners in this project acting as
facilitators in community based planning.
Seventy five percent of the funds will be used in the provinces of
Sulawesi Tenggara, Sulawesi Seletan, NTT and NTB. These areas were chosen
by the Governments of Indonesia and Australia because they contain some
of the poorest communities in Indonesia.
Julie Klugman is the Team Leader
for ACCESS.
Here's what Julie told KGRE about the work
of the project.
'The project began in February (2002) this
year. It replaces the small activities scheme
which was funded directly through the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. The
ACCESS Project is based in Bali, but we have 4 target provinces. Those
provinces are NTT, NTB, South Sulawesi and Southeast Sulawesi. Seventy
five percent (75%) of funding will be allocated to these provinces,
the remaining twenty five percent (25%) to other provinces.
During the consultations between the Australian
& Indonesian government, it was decided that these 4 provinces
should be the focus of support for the ACCESS Program. The decision was
made on the basis of a number of factors, including high poverty levels
in these 4 provinces in the eastern islands of Indonesia'.
Julie explained that ACCESS
is taking over the roles formerly played by SAS - the Small Activities
Scheme. Click here for examples of SAS activities featured on KGRE - SAS
in Maumere, SAS
in Karangsari, West Java and SAS
in Yogyakarta and Jakarta.
'There
are probably many of your listeners who are familiar with the SAS program.
There was an evaluation of SAS in 2001. The evaluation team found
that whilst there was many very good, very worthwhile activities supported
through the scheme, but there would be a number of ways in which to further
that improve that scheme.
The main differences
with ACCESS compared to IASAS, are that:
- It has a much more
targeted geographic area -the 4 provinces which I just mentioned.
- Many more attention
and support will be allocated towards improving the capacity of LSMs,
non government organizations to work with communities in those four
provinces.
'The
overall goal of the project is the same and that is to help reduce poverty
throughout those areas of Indonesia'.
'It has been widely acknowledge that
support for non government organizations is a good way to reach the poorest
people within communities. NGOs which are working well have a very good
network. Whilst ACCESS acknowledges this, it also acknowledges that many
NGOs in Indonesia can benefit from some additional capacity building support.
Capacity building can be across a number of areas which will be determined
in consultation with the NGOs in each of the provinces.
Capacity building
can consist of activities like workshops, mentoring programs, local study
tours to other provinces or to other organizations within a province to
see how activities is carried out by other organizations. Areas what capacity
building could be provided could include participatory planning, gender
analysis skills, financial management, financial sustainability.
The ACCESS team has,
over the last couple of months, been visiting each of the target provinces
and some of the districts within target provinces basically giving
briefing workshops to NGOs there, explaining the objectives of ACCESS,
different grant types that are available, and capacity building
support which is available. Generally we have had good response and there
has been a great deal of interest shown by the NGOs in the capacity building
aspects of the project. I think many of NGOs feel as though that they
can benefit by having improved skills to enable them to work more effectively
with the community'.
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