Strategic planning and fundraising for youth

The African Youth Panel is a platform of youth leaders from different African countries. It is committed to advancing policy, political and economic actions to reduce youth unemployment and to enhancing governance and participation.

The AYP was initiated by the Danish NGO Forum, to provide input to the Danish Africa Commission (DAC) on what youth can do in Africa’s development as well in what development partners should do to ensure that tangible results are achieved with their support.

In its first years, the AYP achieved some remarkable breakthroughs and managed to build a strong political network.

Purpose of the assignment

StrategyHouse.dk was engaged to support the network with a strategy and fundraising development process that could assist the network to becomw financially and organisationally sustainable. The AYP had already received substantial start-up funding from Danida, but needed to diversify its funding and move from incubation to a mature stage.

Challenges

One of the major challenges for the AYP was the lack of paid staff and a secretariat, to ensure consistency in the work flow, constant delivery and implementation of the plans. The AYP’s structure comprises a panel of 60 young people in over 23 African countries. A Steering Committee is the governance arm of the AYP with representatives from all sub-regions of Africa. Given this set-up, an additional challenge were  how to enable the network to meet (very costly) and how to facilitate coordination across the continent (very time consuming), in order to ensure that the AYP could succeed in its lobbying ambitions.

Solutions

StrategyHouse worked with the AYP during training and planning sessions to solidify its strategic planning. This included a review of the ‘2015-2018 Strategic Plan’ to ensure the right balance between objectives, campaign activities and resources. It also included a classic fundraising training session to enable participants to pitch their cases andbe aware of the key steps and elements in professional fundraising. A theory of change training and planning workshop ensured a solid analysis was made in order to be able to establish a shared understanding of what activities would lead to the goals and  why. This provided the basis for a prioritized planning of campaigning and fundraising activities.

Want to know more?

Contact Morten Ronnenberg mrm@strategyhouse.dk