Course one lot two starts

Extra Curriculum

The students helping the start of CBO workshop.

Community Based Ogranisation

CBO WORKSHOP AT MUSOMA INFORMATION CENTER

We closely work with CBO’s who partner with self help groups to provide interventions that impact youth from “Mazingira Magumu” as is said in Tanzania. Working with self help groups can sometimes be challenging owing to the dynamic nature behind which they are established. Few of these self-help groups survive beyond one year and most succumb to misappropriation of funds, or in fighting between the memberships. In real sense  problems that face these projects are numerous. What we realize, these problems can be minimized if people residing in the informal settlements are coached through governance and management skills. There are countless benefits to having a proper governance structure and management system in place. For instance it is so easy to outsource for funds from the ever stringent donors’ community, it is easy to attract competent personnel to steer the organization to the next level, resources even though meager would be shared and managed well and many more benefits.

By holding the Governance and management workshop in Musoma Information center on the 28th of February and 1^st of March 2011 we were hoping to achieve the following objectives.

Objectives of the workshop were as follows:-

• To strengthen the Governance of the partnering CBO’s.
• To strengthen the Management practices of the partnering CBO’s.
• To revisit NairoBits recruitment policies

Briefly, we looked at differences between good governance and bad governance and even drew comparison to what is happening in the Middle East where regimes are being thrown out office for having overstayed their mandate for too long. We looked at the good systems as those found in other places of the world like America and compared with our own African states where incumbent keep twisting systems and institutions to keep them in office at any cost. We then narrowed these examples to our very own CBO’s governance within the community level.

We delved in management issues such as leadership styles, management functions such as planning, organizing, controlling and leading and how all these impacted the actions of an organization positively or negatively. We learnt that there were 14 principles of management namely:- Division of work, Authority, Responsibility, Discipline, Unity of direction, Unity of Command, Remuneration of personnel, Centralization, Scalar chain, Order, Fayol and Espirit principles.

This was the first capacity building workshop designed to build CBO’s working with the Musoma Information center in Tanzania.  The two day workshop was well attended by the targeted partners who included:-Watoto Wapinge Ukimwi, Pastoral Diocese Department (PDD), St. Anthony Vocational Training center, Community Alive, Mji wa Huruma, Umoja wa Maendeleo wa Mukwaya(UMMABU), and  Jipemoyo.

Apart from facilitating discussions on good governance and good management practices in this workshop, we did CBO capacity Assessment on the same aspects. It was emerging that there has been a lot of intervention in the offing for issues as child right, child abuse, the girl child but not as much emphasis on governance and management.

As we closed the workshop, agreed that the next CBO workshop to be held on the 19^th of May 2011 as had been scheduled on the work-plan by the project manager. The participants suggested that NairoBits provide capacity building and training on the following topical issues: Participatory leadership, Communication in management, capacity building as a concept and ICT.