Strengthening implementation capacities for investments
The setting up of investments requires specific project ownership and project building capacities. The F4F programme relies on the appropriation of investments by the local governments. The local government manages the projects for all its activities for which it defines the objectives, its programme of activities or investments and services to the population. Once the approval is formulated, the work is in the hands of the municipality which has the task to ensure the durability of its management.
The methodology advocated by F4F ensures that the investments, but also the methods, techniques, organizations and the mechanisms that have allowed their implementation, are sure to continue providing the expected benefits sustainably.
For the F4F programme, an achievement is made durable when the management method can ensure financial viability: if it is an investment, the mechanisms are in place to generate and/or ensure at the minimum, the necessary resources to the maintenance and good functioning.
Given that the financial and institutional aspects are tightly linked, additionally to the durability of investments, the F4F programme puts the emphasis on the formal integration of achievements, including the settlement in the management of investments, in the organizational structure and the partners’ management structures.
Every investment is therefore accompanied by a clearly established management system with a clear definition of the institutional roles of the concerned actors, on which practices necessary for financial and institutional sustainability can be developed. Finally, F4F ensures the internalization of knowledge and of the necessary practices for good management by the partners and their organization. On the basis of a diagnostic of capacities and needs, capacity building is sometimes considered so each actor can accomplish their given tasks and so we can talk about a real acquisition of gains.
Investments and practices that are viable financially, integrated at the institutional and organizational level, and for which the necessary experience is anchored within the local structures, are then prone to become widespread, which means they can be reproduced by the actors themselves and disseminated through experience exchanges.
The arrangement of the multi-actor monitoring-evaluation system starts from the planning stage; regular exchanges between the actors and the periodic review workshops contribute to the acquisition and good functioning of the governance system.
