Despite substantial spending on family planning and reproductive health in Africa during the previous years, there still pregnancy deaths, high fertility rates, huge unmet need for family planning services and restricted access to safe abortion. The funding of course has contributed overall towards slowing down the population growth. However, more efforts need to be undertaken locally for improving the quality of funding resources to address many other issues. The Foundation’s document identifies some of the factors responsible for these problems like there is poor transparency in the flow of resources, unfavorable donor as well as government policies and lack of effective planning and balance in the distribution of resources.
In this context, the Tides Foundation is specifically seeking solutions that will target at improving the process of the funding for family planning and reproductive health so that the benefits for the targeted communities can further increase and become more effective. The results of these solutions can be that a higher number of women are able to access family planning services and there are new methods to delivery education on sexuality and family pllaning. The Foundation also mentions in the document that assessing such solutions at an early stage may be difficult yet these have to be clearly explained in the Letters of Interest.
The proposed solutions should be within the timeframe of 1-3 years and should be planned and intervened at the policy-level by applying a set of advocacy strategies. The work can be “at the local, institutional, systemic, national, multi-country, international or other levels.”
The Tides Foundation encourages local organizations in the region to apply for this funding support. Even a group or coalition of organizations are eligible to apply for the program. A total funding of US $3.5 million has been pooled for this program but the budgetary limits for each proposed intervention has not been specified though this information has to be submitted by the proponent in the Letter of Interest.
The Letter of Interest will consist of an Organization Information Sheet. This sheet can be downloaded from the Foundation’s website. It consists of the basic information needed about the applicant organization including its scope, areas of internvention, strategies adopted and issues addressed. After filling this sheet, the applicant has to prepare the detailed Letter of Interest. The Letter of Interest will consist of one narrative description, not more than five pages, explaining the proposed solution and the activities associated with it and a preliminary budget in US dollars.
All this information can be submitted by email. The last date for receiving the Letters of Interest is 12 June 2009. For more information, visit this link.
