Funding Distribution

The second year for the strategy period 2005-2010, has experienced noticeable progress on the various interventions called for in Sakha Ikusasa II.

Expansion into the SADC Region

The South African Development Community (SADC) Treaty, protocols, conversations, the HIV and AIDS Response Plan and various other instruments, make provision for a clear mandate to collectively mitigate the adverse impacts and challenges facing the development of children and youth.  These various plans and instruments offer civil society and other institutions an opportunity to scale up advocacy, drive dialogue and to ensure that supported by a strong and positive political will that enjoys the capability of being converted into effective programmes in support of children and youth on the ground.

Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund (NMCF) has been involved in a series of studies and discussions on the plight of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in Southern Africa in the last two years.  The Fund is now better positioned to engage various stakeholders at a higher level on topical issues affecting OVC in the region, at the Africa Forum of former heads of states scheduled for October 2007, has already been despatched. 

The presentation at the proposed Africa Forum of former heads of states is, in essence, the commencement of the application of a strategy that draws its rationale from the Fund’s SADC regional advocacy framework.  In February 2007, stakeholders from six SADC countries made pointed recommendations on themes and challenges that require immediate attention.  The strategy went into higher gear with the Fund engaging in higher level, thereby becoming one of the few civil society organizations to facilitate NGO attendance at the African Union (AU) Committee of Experts on the Rights Welfare of the Child.   

Furthermore, the presentation will focus on critical areas identified as priority challenges facing the mitigation of vulnerability for children in the region.  It will highlight topical issues identified during a series of engagements between the Fund, development partners and civil society organizations from the SADC region, as well as highlighting possible strategies for concerned efforts to address the plight of OVC, particularly the impact of HIV and AIDS on society.

Advocacy Strategy

The Fund not only recognises the need to make funding available to partners but also calls for the levelling authority of the State to make its presence felt in dealing with the plight of children. The issues are diverse and many, and after consultation between management and trustees, it was agreed that the Fund needs to:

• register its presence in policy input and legislative development to ensure redress of children’s issues on a wider societal scale through allocation of resources by government, the private sector and development donors
• Impress and strengthen local government response
• Influence co-ordinated community responses to children’s needs

The areas of advocacy are diverse and it has been decided that, the next financial year will focus on foster care, OVC intervening strategies within the region and early childhood development of children outside the existing safety net and child safely and protection.

The Fund’s Goelama programme, a strategic response a to HIV and AIDS has three result areas which include:

• the strengthening of families
• the strengthening of communities
• energising local government response

These result areas, in combating HIV and AIDS, have become commonplace within the development sector and Goelama as a model of intervention, will soon be documented for the benefit of broader society.

Corporate Indaba

The concept of a corporate indaba emerged from a donor meeting, where the Fund was requested to generate a concept paper and table it to the both the broader funding community and the development sector as a basis for a structured strategic dialogue between the two sectors, with the Fund serving as a convener.  The broader funding community means bringing more than just the funding partners into a dialogue.  It also means bringing strategic and implementing partners both, within and outside the fold of the Fund together.

The corporate indaba seeks to:

• create an annual platform for a strategic dialogue in which issues of development, as response to redressing the plight of affected communities, would have the space to be handled outside the constraints of donor-grantee relations
• lift discussions from the everyday marketing Public Relations operational pressures to the strategic level of leaders of business, corporate, funding foundations and development agencies
• locate the dialogue within SADC’s national development goals and the universal framework presented by the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s)
• expose dialogue participants to various causes that merit a country response and support
• provide implementing partner representatives an opportunity to share the insights of their work and working models of intervention
• involve leaders of the business sector to share their perspectives and expertise of how best can their respective entities’ responses relate to jointly identified national goals and priorities

The Indaba is scheduled to take place in September 2007.  It is anticipated that the deliberations of the corporate indaba consensus points will be used to craft a strategic national development action plan (NDAP).  It is further envisaged that it will result in a commitment by the corporate leaders to advice plans that align their respective entities’ responses to finding a strategic connect with the NDAP

Advancement of the Status of Women

In deliberating upon a vision for the African Child, the Fund became painfully aware of the weakening and collapse of families and communities caused by underdevelopment and neglect resulting in hunger, poverty, conflict, disease and powerlessness.  The Fund alone cannot even begin to address the impact this has on society and its children and has thus embarked upon a initiative known as the Advancement of the Status of Women (ASW).  Its vision to become a dependable platform of women leaders united in interests, aims and observance of constitutional rights in order to advance the cause for a human society, the foundation of which is the family.

The ASW represents a creative response to help bolster a women’s movement and the advance of their status as both the pillars for desired stronger families and as chief custodian of children’s well-being.

As pointed out by former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Anan, women provide the last line of defense on which the survival of children primarily depends and “there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women”.

In his message to The State of the World’s Children 2007 Anan said: “When women are healthy, educated and free to take the opportunities life affords them, children thrive and communities flourish, reaping a double dividend for women and children.”

Conceived as a lobby, advocacy and think-tank group, the ASW should allow no opportunity to go by without providing input to public policy development whenever the opportunities are presented. The ASW should help us drive home the point that there can be no normal society without strong families that can provide the best defense for all its children to grow and enjoy the benefits of common humanity.

Common humanity entails assembling all the thinking, efforts and resources that can possibly be mustered in the service of normalising a society in which children are born to experience a life to its fullest. We can never successfully bring about the best for our children without strategic engagement of key sectors of the very society we have been tasked to change.

The ASW initiative enjoys the endorsement and participation of prominent leading South African women that include Tshwane executive mayor Dr Gwen Ramakgopa, business woman pioneer Wendy Luhabe, United Nations Resident representative and co-ordinator of UN system Scholastica Kimaryo and Independent Electoral Commission CEO Pansy Tlakula.

The Story of the Fund

What easily could have been a passing incident, and without reason to write home about, surprisingly left a lasting impression to become the fundamental cause behind the establishment of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund in 1995, by former president Nelson Mandela.

The incident took place happened just before South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. Nelson Mandela was leaving an exclusive Cape Town hotel where he had attended a meeting when a group of children ran up to his car. These children were part were part of that phenomenon known as ‘street kids’. It was freezing and they were scantily dressed. Thus labelled, these children were placed at the periphery of society’s wider but distant problems deserving no specific or immediate attention.

At that very moment, Mr. Mandela came to accept that it was not good enough to say that their problems would be solved along with those of the entire country. In their innocence, he thought, they were in reality the targets that our history had rendered as its weakest victims. That is how the concept of a fund dedicated to children’s needs and aspirations of our youth was born.

As it is typical with emergency situations, the early responses of the Fund saw it providing food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, and clothes to those without. An equally committed group of individuals, from different spheres of their working life, were similarly touched to give their all, and to serve in various capacities as donors, strategic and implementing partners, staff, management and Trustees.

Today, the Fund has transformed from being a grant-making organisation into a development agency driven by a proactive programmatic agenda and respected by its peers nationally and internationally. The models of its responses to childcare and protection, and youth development programmes have also been heard in global forums.

None of these strides would have been realised without the continued and growing support of friends and donors over the years - both in South Africa and around the world. This makes a compelling case for the Fund to tell its twelve-year old story.

Business brings its voice to poverty alleviation

The Old Mutual Retirement Reform Conference in October 2006 did more than explore innovative product development offerings for women's financial independence.

The conference, at which the Fund delivered a keynote address and represent the voice of development, also arrived at the conclusion that lack of health care, relevant education, failure by training institutions to be responsive towards local community and industry needs, and ineffective acquisition and transfer of skills were contributory factors to delivery of poor products and services. These factors were said to be increasing unemployment and thus condemning many to deeper levels of poverty.

The evaluative thinking emerging out of this conference gave rationale to the proposition for the establishment of a multi-sectoral partnership featuring business, government and civil society development agencies - with a focus on poverty eradication. The founding group established as result, is geared at exploring responsive, viable and participatory anti-poverty strategies to be implemented by the multi-sectoral partnership.  Fighting and winning the war against HIV and AIDS is a necessary condition towards the realization of the vision of an African child by 2015

The war declared by the Department of Health in the 2006-2011 National Strategic Plan (NSP), to combat HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, has been met with newfound energy by all sectors within our society. More than counting on us as an ally in that battle, the commitments expressed in the NSP, fall in line with the Fund’s unfolding intervention strategies requiring full implementation by 2015.

Interventions by 2015 envisage the following outcomes:

• communities have been effectively mobilised to respond to the HIV and AIDS epidemic. They have taken ownership of the epidemic and collectively share the comprehensive response to the epidemic, including high impact prevention programmes, effective treatment programmes and the stigma and discrimination surrounding HIV and AIDS is all but gone.
• the incidence of HIV and AIDS has been significantly slowed down and the caseload of new infections drastically reduced. National treatment programmes are operational with access to treatment for all, particularly through public health systems
• national legal frameworks have been reviewed and are well harmonised to respond to the epidemic and address particularly, the needs of OVC. States have ratified international conventions for the protection of children and have effective implementation programmes with well developed indicators.
• governance systems in states and at community levels are based on democratic participatory approaches, embrace child-centered perspectives and respect for children’s rights as a core component of human rights
• SADC states have developed coordinated regional HIV and AIDS management programmes with effective implementation, monitoring and evaluation systems. Data is shared across institutions and response systems are effective and interlinked in mutually beneficial ways. Institutional synergies are harnessed and all development programmes have mainstreamed HIV and AIDS as a critical and core competency area
• the leadership of the continent via the African Union (AU) and the New partnership for Africa’s NEPAD has strengthened response mechanisms to HIV and AIDS and has formulated child focused action plans
• the international community has responded with determined commitment to the crisis facing the region and the continent, and global decision-making is decisively acting to support the continent’s fight against HIV and AIDS as a global struggle for human rights

To fight and win the battle against HIV and AIDS is an obligatory precondition to overcome in order to place a firm grip on the realisation of the vision of an African Child by 2015. The realisation of this vision demands a well-resourced regional HIV and AIDS response with the requisite capacity to implement it.

The current global commitment to fighting the epidemic has changed, with well- resourced global initiatives enabling higher impact, scaled up comprehensive programmes to fight HIV and AIDS. Effective treatment programmes have enhanced people’s quality of life enabling parents and carers to care for children. Poverty reduction strategies are succeeding, enhancing the development of sustainable livelihoods and mitigating poverty. Reformed legal systems provide strong protection and effective law enforcement programmes for children. SADC triumphs against the epidemic, turning it around with concomitant gains in attainment of millennium development goals and International development goals. 

Resource Mobilisation

In the current year, undesignated funds in total far exceeded our target by R4 million.  This was made possible by the complementary efforts of our international affiliate offices.

Plans are afoot to forge long term relationships through a Corporate Indaba, which will entail stakeholders such as government, corporate entities and international donor agencies to consider and formulate a national development plan.

We anticipate that Club memberships for Foundations and corporate business will increase through various initiatives.

Affiliates

A global review of affiliate offices worldwide was conducted with a view to streamlining and strengthening these offices and after consultation with each office, the following action was taken:

• the offices of Spain and France were closed;
• the office in Germany will be open for a pilot period of two years, whereafter a decision will be made whether operations should continue in this country;
• The office in the USA was moved to SA Partners and the board of directors was restructured.  We wish to record our gratitude to Ambassador Barbara Masekela in facilitating this process.

We also recognise the enormous contribution made by our offices in the UK, Canada and the Netherlands.

Cost Ratio

Once again we have managed to maintain our cost ratios of fundraising as 85 of funds raised, and grant making 155 of total grant made, within target.  This mirrors our constant dedication to ever be aware of keeping costs at a minimum.