NGO Guidelines for non-governmental organisations, Botswana REF: 934

RPA was subcontracted by Egis of France to provide support to the Empowering Non-State Actors (ENSA) programme in Botswana to develop a revised set of policy guidelines governing the allocation and management of funds to non-governmental organisations across the country.

The ENSA programme was financed under the European Development Fund and the main purpose of the Policy Guidelines for Financial Support to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) is to harmonize and strengthen administrative and management procedures across all public entities providing funding to NGOs.  The Guidelines are based on a set of principles among which the most important are the improvement of transparency and accountability across all the financing cycle, and ensuring free and fair competition and equal treatment of all applications.  RPA carried out a comprehensive review of the guidelines originally put in place in 2001 and subsequently revised in 2014 and consulted widely with government departments and NGOs on all aspects of their experience in providing and implementing short term grants and longer term funding across the complete project/programme cycle.

The revised guidelines incorporated in-country experience combined with best practice from other middle income countries and were finalised in 2017 when they were adopted by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development as the primary tool for guiding the allocation, monitoring and evaluation of government funding to non-governmental organisations in Botswana.