**UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT**

**CFBCI PARTNERSHIP CONFERENCE:**

**BREAKOUT: SUCCESSFUL INTERMEDIARY PARTNERSHIPS**

**WELCOME AND MODERATOR:**

KEN ISAACS,

VICE PRESIDENT, PROJECTS AND GOVERNMENT RELATIONS,

SAMARITAN'S PURSE

**SPEAKERS:**

BRUCE WILKINSON,

DIRECTOR, RAPIDS PROGRAM,

USAID

SARAH FORD,

SENIOR TECHNICAL ADVISOR FOR PARTNERSHIPS,

CATHOLIC RELIEF SERVICES

ROBIN WEEKLEY,

LIVING WATER INTERNATIONAL

JEAN DUFF,

DIRECTOR,

CENTER FOR INTERFAITH ACTION ON GLOBAL POVERTY

SUSAN ADAMS,

DIRECTOR OF NEW PARTNER OUTREACH,

U.S. PEPFAR

**FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2008**

*Transcript by*

*Federal News Service*

*Washington, D.C.*

KEN ISAACS: Okay. We're running a little bit late; sorry for that. It
was sort of a challenge to find the room, I thought. (Laughter.) But
we're glad that you all made it and persevered anyway. We, today -- this
panel discussion -- will talk about successful intermediary
partnerships. And my name is Ken Isaacs. I work with Samaritan's Purse
and I have for about 20 years, and I had the opportunity to be in the
government for about a year. I'm going to introduce the other members of
the panel here in a moment, but I'd like to take just a quick poll of
the audience here to understand who we're speaking to. If you work for
an NGO and you have received USAID funding, would you raise your hand?
Okay, if you have never received USAID funding, would you raise your
hand? Ah, okay. This will be pretty interesting. If you think
partnerships are a pain in the neck, raise your hand? (Laughter.) Ah,
okay. This is going to be an interesting -- (inaudible).

Let's see, how can we go about this? I'm just going to make a few
opening remarks and then I'll introduce each person. Would that be all
right? Do we have a consensus, here? I just made some notes last night
in the hotel room about partnerships, and I've had the opportunity, in
the 20 years that I've been doing this, to go from an organization that
had no staff and no resources -- a very small organization -- to one --
so many times now, we're considered a big organization. But it's been an
interesting education to see it grow and to see how we interact with
USAID and interact with other organizations and how we in fact, now,
develop partnerships and pursue them or not pursue them. I've found that
partnerships are not easy but they're often necessary; I was very
excited to hear of some of the plenary speakers. Particularly, I look
forward to hearing again from Bruce here, today, about how he's built a
partnership there in Zambia that is really amazing. And they've come
together for a common point and purpose.

Partnerships, I think, are a lot like marriage; they require
understanding, patience, commitment, thoughtfulness, clear
understanding, flexibility and accountability. And they're not easy to
be in. But there's advantages and strengths to being in a partnership.
And I think probably the one thing that people and organizations look
for initially in a partnership is access to money, access to funding. Is
that -- raise your hand if that's what you think -- raise your hand and
let me see here. Okay, one brave person back there. (Laughter.) But I
know the rest of you are thinking that, too, you just don't want to own
up to it. And that's true -- there can be access to more funding. But it
has other advantages. The coordination of activities can be very
important, particularly if you want to have like a focused response on a
single sector or a single need or a single geography.

It also leverages resources; if you bring something to the table,
somebody else will also bring something to the table because, in a way,
you have encouraged them. It can also give you higher visibility because
you can do more together than you can alone. It can be a significant
boost in your organizational capacity as it's combined with other
organizations and governments and corporations. It can be a tremendous
learning opportunity for everybody that participates in it; that's one
of the most exciting things that I've always enjoyed about partnerships
is I have the opportunity to come around groups that know how to do
things better than we do. And so, you know, our folks have an
opportunity to learn from that. And then you have access to greater
technical skills and implementing those technical skills. If they're
coming from another organization, they can also be an enhancement to
your own work.

Partnerships also have disadvantages and weaknesses, too. They can be
awkward; they can be time-consuming -- you know, you have to focus with
intentionality to make a partnership work. You're going to have some
identity loss in a partnership. It was interesting listening to Bruce
today -- I'm looking forward to hearing the other panelists speak also.
When Bruce went to Zambia, I think you were working for World Vision.
But now, today, you're at RAPIDS. So World Vision still has their
identity in it, but another identity has been created as well. And I can
speak firsthand to that on some things that we're doing in North Korea
with World Vision and Mercy Corps. The decision-making process needs to
be clarified; how is that done? Sometimes, if you're a minor partner,
you can find yourself in the dust.

If you're a primary partner, your program will only be as good as your
minor partners are connected. So communicating back downstream and
communicating upstream are very important. You can have funding stream
issues -- cash flow problems. The funding has to be approved at several
levels before it gets to you -- vulnerability for the action of the
other partners. Mismatched objectives; I think that's an important
thing. You need to make sure who you're working with and that you're on
the same page objective-wise. Balance of power, respective equities --
that's an issue -- miscommunications and misunderstandings. If you have
all the resources, skills and access that you need to do something, then
avoid a partnership. But the chances are, if you're like every other
group, you don't -- you don't have everything that you need to do
everything that you want. So partnerships, I think, can be a real
resource and a force multiplier, and can be a boost, not only to your
organization, but it can be a boost to achieve what your objectives are.

So with those opening comments, I'm just going to now introduce Sarah
Ford. Sarah is the senior technical adviser of her partnership at
Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore. Sarah helps CRS country programs
work effectively in solidarity with its church and secular partners in
order to better serve the poor. And I'm going to pass this down to you
now. Oh you want to come up here? Yeah. Sarah has a PowerPoint. We're
ad-libbing this as we go right here.

SARAH FORD: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much, Ken. Can you
all -- oops, what am I doing -- can you all hear me? This is what
happens when I try and talk and use technology at the same time -- I'm
opening the Internet, so --

MR. ISAACS: Is the mike on? Can you all hear her on the speakers?

MS. FORD: I'll get a little closer, too. There we go. I'd like to
address the issue of partnership at CRS as a faith-based organization
and talk about why partnership, for us, is inherent and essential to who
we are as an organization and to how we work. Like every NGO in the
world, whether we're faith-based or secular, we're a values-driven
organization and part of our values comes from our belief in partnership
and our belief that partnership is -- that change occurs through
partnership, that sustaining and engaging with local institutions, be
they church or non-church, around the world is how change actually
occurs.

So because, for over 60 years we've worked in partnership with a variety
of organizations around the world, we have a variety of ways of
assessing our compatibility with other organizations and, together,
determining how we might best work together. We've come, over time, to
believe that strong partnerships are built on three primary criteria
that are vision, solidarity and impact. Our vision doesn't mean that we
agree on every issue, but that we share common thoughts about the
underlying causes of poverty and injustice, we have interest in going in
the same direction and exploring ways to resolve the most pressing
issues in the world.

That we believe in solidarity; we believe that only through trusting
relationships, that only through commitment to working together for
long-term change can we actually make a change in the world. That we
have to work hand-in-hand. And, fundamentally, we believe that just our
relationships alone are not enough; it's not enough for us to have a
strong and meaningful relationship between CRS and a local partner
without the impact that we make in the world. Without the change we see
in the lives of the poor, our partnerships are fundamentally, in a
sense, almost unimportant.

That being said, all partnerships are not the same. We partner with a
variety of organizations for a variety of different reasons. In some,
they are primarily solidarity relationships. That sometimes includes the
Catholic Church around the world, or organizations with whom we do not
have active, ongoing programs, but with whom we share a deep commitment
and a common vision and values. We may be present on committees
together, do advocacy work together or share interest in issues of
poverty in that country. In some, we have a relationship that's based
around a specific funding stream that has to do with project
implementation. And there may be documents that dictate how we work
together, but overlying that relationship is still that commitment to a
common vision and a commitment to our solidarity and a commitment to
making a difference in the lives of the poor.

And some are long-standing, long-term partnerships. Certainly, with our
Catholic Church partners around the world, but also with partners of
other faiths and with secular partners where our relationship extends
beyond a certain cycle of funding and it continues on for ongoing change
in the world. Partnerships, as Ken said, take time to develop. If you
want to have a trusting, meaningful and long-term relationship and if
you want to achieve impact in the world, it means that you have to have
a personal commitment to the people with whom you are working and your
organization needs to be committed to dedicating the time and the
resources to dedicate to partnership, not just to program or project
outcome. That you have to be willing to structure your organization in
such a way that it sustains relationships with other organizations and
facilitates getting work done through a partnership.

Finally, it means that you have to believe profoundly that the
partnership and the benefits of partnership outweigh the constraints
because, as Ken said, if we could do it all alone, a lot of
organizations would. You have to believe that together, we're stronger,
that two or 10 heads are better than one and that the very act of
working together, whether it's north-south, south-south or even
north-north, that together we are stronger and we're making a greater
impact. We are part of the Catholic Church; our presence around the
world is an expression of the Catholic Church's love and solidarity in
the world. And we try to engage local Catholics in actions geared to
support around the world. We do work with a wide range of organizations,
both Catholic and non-Catholic, secular and other faiths around the
world. We don't discriminate in our service delivery or in our
partnerships; our work is open and we collaborate with all.

As I mentioned, the important factors to us are that values congruence;
we're very clear on our values that are derived from the Gospel, from
Catholic social teaching and from partnership principles. We value
transparency in all our relationships and we try to hold ourselves to
the highest standard, whether we're the prime -- the big organization in
a partnership -- or we're a sub-recipient under a grant, we demand a
level of transparency from ourself and we ask that from our partners. At
the same time, trying to balance confidentiality, so when we meet, and
we talk about how we might work as partners, we need to talk about how
can we achieve transparency; what level of confidentiality are we
expecting? Because we are a partnership-driven organization, we are not
operational, except in very rare circumstances.

All of our work is done through or with partners in the countries where
we work. So we ask that our other international partners -- our Northern
partners -- to respect our existing relationships and we expect -- we
hold ourselves to respect theirs as well, so as to not go around and
demand relationships with our partners' other partners. We expect good
negotiation and discussions on cost-share in NICRA. If you've not
received U.S. government funding before, these are terms you'll rapidly
become familiar with. And there's things that -- as you negotiate your
relationship with a larger NGO, you need to talk about cost-share. We
expect the cost-share to be equally shared with all partners and that we
will not take NICRA on settled wars.

Finally, and most importantly, we need to talk about the programmatic,
managerial and financial abilities that we each hold as organizations
and how our programmatic strengths, our managerial strengths and our
financial strengths are complimentary. In the case of a local
non-profit, be it church or non-church, we can also talk about where our
-- CRS's -- programmatic, managerial or financial skills can be used to
build the capacity -- (inaudible) -- organizations. But we learn from
and are enormously enriched by their local capacity to work with
communities and their technical capacity.

I want to end with just a very brief discussion of a few of the things
that we're very proud of and very proud to partner with these
organizations and countries. We've been engaged with the Southern
African Catholic Bishops Conference for a number of years. They were a
strong organization when we began to work with them, but they've
continued to get stronger. They've asked us for strategic assistance in
strengthening their programmatic and managerial capacity to the point
where, this year, they were directly awarded a \$130 million PEPFAR
award, so we're extremely proud of our SACBC partners. The Catholic
Secretariat of Nigeria asked us several -- about five, six years ago --
to begin a long-term process of strengthening their capacity, to look at
their ability to manage programs on their own, to manage finances on
their own and to increase their level of transparency and
accountability. As a result, this year, they received a \$7 million
award directly from USAID. So we're extremely happy for our partners at
the Catholic Secretariat.

Our country program in India is divided up into many sub-regional
offices. One of the practices that India has developed that we try to
encourage other country programs to work on is to appoint a partnership
officer who works with program staff and finance staff. And they work
hand-in-hand with our local partners to try to increase their capacity,
to the result that many of our local partners -- we have hundreds of
local partners in India -- many of our partners there are now receiving
awards directly from the U.S. government, from DFID and from
foundations.

And I'll end with just a current example -- I'm actually leaving for the
Dominican Republic next week, where I'll be working with the CRS DR
office on a two-year award they received from USAID to increase the
capacity of five Dominican organizations -- educational organizations
working with out-of-school youth. They've asked -- USAID has asked us to
work with those organizations in order to improve their capacity to the
point where they also will be able to access USAID funds directly. If
you're interested in -- each of our organizations is a bit different --
I know, for CRS, we are an extremely decentralized office where
decisions -- or organization, I should say -- where decisions are made
at the country program level.

If your organization has a presence in a country and you're interested
in working with Catholic Relief Services, I highly urge you to make an
appointment with the country office, get to know them, talk about your
activities in-country. We do not engage in any partnerships at the
headquarters level; all of our partnerships are negotiated and arranged
at the country program level. I'm happy to answer any questions, and I
hope you locate a country program office if you'd like. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. ISAACS: We'll have questions and answers and discussion at the end.
Next, I want to introduce Robin Weekly. Robin, if you would start
working your way down here.

ROBIN WEEKLY: Yeah, I don't have a PowerPoint, so -- (chuckles).

MR. ISAACS: That's fine, just get up there and speak. Do you want this?

MS. WEEKLY: I can go -- I'll just hop on up there.

MR. ISAACS: Okay. Robin works as a member of the advancement team at
Living Water International, where she focuses on forming strategic
partnerships and alliances to help promote the cause of clean water
around the world. She has been a passionate advocate for social justice
and development throughout her professional career. Since first coming
upon Living Water International nearly 10 years ago, her heart has been
taken for the global water crisis and the people who suffer daily from a
lack of clean water.

MS. WEEKLY: Thanks, Ken. You'll have to excuse me, my voice, too, like
one of our speakers earlier this morning, is very in and out. If I cut
out, hopefully I'll realize and get some water and take care of it. I
wanted to start by just sort of going on what Sarah said and talk about
a few specific partnership examples that sort of illustrate the way that
Living Water really works with partners in a variety of circumstances.
For those of you not familiar with Living Water International, we're a
Houston-based 501(c)(3). We've been around for about 17 years now and
specialize and focus solely on water solutions. Usually, that looks like
shallow wells and deep wells and well rehabs; sometimes, it looks like
water filtration systems. We work in about 26 countries, serving 9.5
million people every day with clean water.

So we're constantly growing and a lot of that is through partnerships --
through the advantage partnerships have given us in the work that we're
doing and the amount that we've learned just through our 17 years. The
first type of partnership that I want to specifically touch on is what
we're talking about here, which is the intermediary partnership,
specifically within a USAID grant level. When we first started off doing
work with USAID, we were not in a position to receive USAID direct grant
money. We were a little bitty, learning what we were doing, didn't have
the kind of quality product nailed down to where we could guarantee that
we were going to get a well done at a certain price -- well, we just
didn't know, we were learning. So we were able to learn through the
process of being a sub-grantee. So, USAID would give the money directly
to a larger organization like a World Vision, like a Catholic Relief,
and we were able to file under that and really hone our skills and
become comparable in the water services we are providing to receive
prime grants, eventually.

One example of this is, a few years ago, USAID was hoping to move into
the Central African Republic. At this point, Living Water and USAID had
developed a great working relationship and Living Water was doing a lot
of water work around the world on behalf of USAID. USAID came to Living
Water and said, hey, we want to go to the Central African Republic, are
you all there yet? We said, no, we're not, but we're next door. We're
basically, you know, we're surrounding the Central African Republic. It
would be feasible and wise for us to start to sort of move and filtrate
our systems into the Central African Republic as well.

And so what we did is, we were able to go into the CAR, find a local
group there, Integrated Community Development International, that was
doing wonderful work -- they were doing a lot of microfinance, they were
doing feeding programs, they had orphanages, and they were starting a
water program. Now, they didn't have the water expertise to be able to
receive that grant from USAID. They were just learning and they were
passionate about learning how to do the water solutions, but just didn't
have the background to receive that grant and to be able to implement
directly. And so Living Water was able to move in, through the USAID
seed money, partner with ICDI and really start to make a dent in the
water crisis in CAR.

And so that to me is just a great example of what successful partnership
looks like on multiple levels. It came from the big, you know,
institutional money -- the USAID money -- and trickled down to an
indigenous group that was really passionate about what they were doing,
open to learning and willing to develop the expertise to become the
water implementers in CAR. So that's sort of a very high-level skim of
how that worked for us. Another example of partnership that's been very
valuable to us is Living Water, specifically, just focuses on water
solutions.

We know our expertise and we honed it on a very specific skill set and
we're implementers, through and through. A lot of our guys out of Texas
used to be oil drillers; now, they're water drillers. So we're water
people. And so we have groups that are passionate storytellers. There's
advocacy groups -- a lot of them here in D.C., some in New York --
they're the ones who can tell the story of the water crisis around the
world better than we could on any day of the week. They're the great
salespeople; they're the ones who can really sell the water crisis. And
so we let that be their strength and we let implementing be our
strength. And so we've sort of set ourselves up to say, hey, you know,
we'll call this your -- you know, this is your well; we'll just do the
work. We'll take our drill rig across the street and drill whatever's
there, and so those are specifically kind of funding partnerships at the
end of the day.

Where water groups here that aren't in a certain country and want to be,
or don't have the drilling capacity to do a deep well will come to us
and just say, can you do this, and we'll say, sure. And there have been
certain relationships like that that have received USAID money as well.
And it's just -- it's grown our organization; it's grown their
organization; and it's helped serve USAID's mission, which is really --
you know, the approach that we've tried to take with USAID in the past
is, hey, how can we serve you guys, not how can we try and get as much
from you as quickly as we can. But where are you trying to work? What
are you trying to accomplish? And if we're there and if we're capable,
how can we serve your mission in this specific country? So that's been a
very successful approach for us in the past.

And then, probably the approach -- which is similar to CRS's -- that we
love the most is what we call our sort of consulting and training
partnerships. This is when our in-country directors will come across
someone -- sometimes it's, you know, a young missionary guy who's there
and has really developed a heart for the water crisis, and he's
determined to do whatever he can to help his community and help those
communities around him, but he has no idea what to do, where to go, how
to buy drilling equipment, and once you get the drilling equipment, then
what?

And so we enter into a lot of partnerships that are specifically based
around training, consulting and helping people in the charity work that
they're doing. And I think, you know, following what Sarah said, our
values within our organization really echo that kind of partnership
strongly, because we believe that we don't own any work that we're doing
in any way. We don't want to be proprietary about wells that we're
drilling and in this sort of thing, we're able to really expand the work
towards ending the water crisis in the world through partnering with
pretty much anyone and everyone that's determined to do something about
water.

We're in no position to get into feeding programs, orphanages, anything
like that, but water, we can do. And so we try to send our guys around
the world training people in every country, sometimes countries that
we're not even -- we don't even have any kind of vested interest in. We
officially don't have programs there, but we have people who have been
trained and who are sort of under the LWI umbrella that work there. And
we've just found that missionally those partnerships are just sort of
the most fundamental to what we're trying to do, which is helping to
alleviate the water crisis.

And so those are sort of the most exciting ones to watch. For instance,
the Millennium Water Alliance is an alliance of a bunch of different
water groups, and they received a grant from USAID to do a huge amount
of work in Kenya. Now, the Millennium Water Alliance then trickled that
grant down to us and a couple other groups -- we're the sub-grantees --
and we then took that to another guy we were working with named James in
Kenya, who has an NGO that he calls Serve International. Now, it's just
him and another guy, but they are -- I mean, they're water gurus; it's
what they want to do. And so we worked alongside them and trained them,
and now, they're basically running an autonomous water organization in
Kenya, doing fabulous work, and without us needing to be alongside them
all the time. So that's the kind of relationship that we like to
develop, mature and then pass off.

So I hope that those examples can sort of flesh out a little bit of the
different kinds of partnerships that work for us. And if -- you know, a
lot of NGOs out there have water needs. If you're doing education,
usually, lots of your schools don't have water, and it affects the kids
who are attending school. So we get a lot of calls from people saying,
can you -- (inaudible, background noise) -- you've got water needs, just
let us know -- (inaudible, background noise) -- do our best; if we don't
have people in-country, hopefully we know people who are. So thank you
very much.

(Applause.)

MR. ISAACS: You've got to get your coordinates right. (Laughter.) I'm
going to introduce, now, Jean Duff. Thank you, Robin. Jean currently
serves as the executive director of the Center for Interfaith Action on
Global Poverty, a new initiative that aims to increase the impact of the
religious sector on global poverty and disease. From 2005 to 2008, Mrs.
Duff served at the Washington National Cathedral Center for Global
Justice and Reconciliation as its managing director and deputy director
-- global justice and global poverty programs. She has a lot -- I'm not
going to read everything here, but I will say this, in closing: For the
past 17 years, she has worked exclusively with organizations serving the
poor and advocating for social justice. There you go, Jean.

JEAN DUFF: Thank you so much, Ken. Good afternoon everybody, thank you
for this opportunity to learn as well as to speak. What an interesting
panel so far. I think if I had had Ken's things to consider on
partnerships when we were starting out, I would have saved myself a lot
of grief. (Chuckles.) So I know I'm going to ultimately learn a lot from
the other panelists, thank you so much. I'm representing the Center for
Interfaith Action on Global Poverty. In short, our mission is to
increase the capacity of the interfaith community in relation to global
poverty and disease, and we work centrally and systemically and
structurally in that regard. I've been asked, today, to speak about a
partnership in Mozambique against malaria. And we'll have something of a
complementary perspective to the two speakers who have gone before me.

There's been a lot of talk -- Rick Warren, I think, has been the
greatest proponent of it -- of mobilizing the capacity of the church at
the end of the road -- the mosque at the end of the road -- tapping into
the untapped potential of the distribution system of the congregational
infrastructure. So, to start with, this partnership revolves around the
big idea of mobilizing faith infrastructure, nationwide or in large
scale, against, in this case, malaria, although one could transpose
HIV/AIDS or any number of other areas into that equation. Our starting
point was with the faith leaders -- not exactly at the end of the road,
actually -- the national faith leaders in Mozambique. But,
fundamentally, our starting point is with the church at the end of the
road, the mosque at the end of the road, the small-faith houses of
worship that exist where no other community institutions exist at all
and where community leadership and education is one of the principal
assets.

We started out with the leaders of the principal national faith
communities in the country of Mozambique, who organized, and basically
helped them to organize themselves into a religious program against
malaria, working for a malaria-free Mozambique. Their vision was to use
the -- to deploy the hierarchical infrastructure of all of their various
religious groups as a community mobilization education and partnering
mechanism, with the public health department -- the Mozambique
department of health -- NGOs, anybody else working in the place. But
since, obviously, the faith leaders were the folks burying those who had
died from malaria, they were the folks on the front lines of education,
they had malaria themselves, they were the people who were at the front
lines of malaria and were very well poised to act against it. Ten
national faith communities came together in Maputo to constitute this
new organization, known in Portuguese as hircom (ph).

And these were the constituent parts. In terms of the partnership, they
needed, in order to be able to bring about their vision of mobilizing on
a very large scale, they clearly needed all kinds of resources and all
kinds of assistance, and the partnership that has come together is known
as the Together Against Malaria partnership. And it consists of the
inter-religious community at the national level, based in Maputo, the
implementing partner is the Adventists Relief and Development Agency,
who we helped to recruit, by virtue of their long experience on the
ground and their sensitivity and interest in the mission of the faith
leaders. And ourselves, based at the Washington National Cathedral, have
been the -- I guess, have had the role of model developer, securer of
resources, publicist and some others. We've worked as a partnership in
very close collaboration, as one must, with the ministry of health in
Mozambique. And, in fact, the relationships with the national faith
leaders have had, at the highest levels of government and civil society,
have been incredibly helpful in building and knitting together the
partnership with various arms of government.

We've also worked very closely with PMI, with USAID and CDC, and
particularly in-country, and being able to tap into their expertise
across the board. So our roles as intermediaries -- we've all had
different roles and specialized roles -- has been to secure funding for
this consortium of religious leaders, to help develop and support the
TAM model, which I will speak more about in a moment, to support the
program implementation, and to document and to publicize what's going on
so that one can set up something of a iterating relationship of support.
In relation to the publicity, the TAM group got a big boost when the
first lady came to Maputo and spoke at one of the inaugural meetings of
the Together Against Malaria partnership. In terms of funding, we've
been able to secure funding for the TAM program from PMI, from the World
Bank and from the UN Foundation, who assist the program with funding to
cover the cost of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets.

The program launched a year ago, now, in the Zambezia Province, which is
in the central area of the country, just about where the word
"Mozambique" appears there. The population, 4 million people, endemic,
year-round malaria, very high mortality rates, extremely low density of
health services, and indeed, low density of any healthcare or
anti-malaria intervention. The faith leaders' goals were to increase
access to information about malaria prevention and treatment to increase
the capacity for faith leaders to lead malaria prevention activities and
to strengthen the faith community coordination with public and private
partners.

The methods that we have just summarized -- and I'd love to take
questions about this -- but the methods that have been pursued has first
been to strengthen the interreligious cooperation at the national level.
A country that is hugely religiously adherent and pluralistic in its
religious profile, strong Muslim community, a very extensive Christian
community, indigenous religious, and many, many, many small churches and
small religious groupings according to different territories. So finding
ways to knit that together. One of the ways to -- the vehicles to
address that has been to create these provincial and district
interreligious councils against malaria that reflect the religious
demographics of the local population. So far the national leaders might
represent the 10 communities that we saw. The constitution of the
district councils is often very, very different. Nevertheless, the
national leaders have been extremely important in calling to action the
local, district, and provincial partners and using their religious
hierarchy and regional authority in battling.

The third piece of the methodology is the district faith leaders train
local faith leaders, so provincial leaders call to action the district
leaders who made the councils and then there's a train-the-trainer,
down-the-line model. And then local faith leaders educate and mobilize
their own communities. Just very quickly, a summary of the first two --
it was all very encouraging when it comes to the question, can the
religious infrastructure on the ground be reached -- kind of be
organized, kind of be accessed? Can it be engaged easily in
disseminating education, prevention information of malaria? In the first
year, with all of the hiccups of the startup of various crises and
insanities, the town program was able to train almost 4,000 faith
leaders to reach almost 350,000 members of congregations, not to mention
the ripple effect those congregants within their own families and within
their communities outside the faith-based community and distributing
packages of faith materials to sustain the ongoing training and work by
faith leaders.

The next steps are to broaden this to two additional provinces in the
country and the state up to the national level, to continue to learn
from successes and the challenges of the first year and strengthening
role, to push our nets into the town distribution system to use the
congregational infrastructure, where the nets are not present as a
result of the limitation of the public health structure to push nets
through the town infrastructure, and to secure additional resources, to
expand -- to all Mozambican provinces. This is a picture of the Bishop
Dinis Sengulane, the Anglican bishop who's such a charismatic leader on
one of the leads of the interreligious campaign in Maputo. His
commitment and the commitment of faith leaders has been a complete
inspiration, not just to various religious leaders in the country, but
to those of us who serve them as intermediaries and as partners.

I'd like to just request -- in advantage of this wonderful group here --
that if you know of successful faith-based partnerships and activities
against malaria, if you'd be so kind as to let us know about them as
part of our opportunity, I think, is to promulgate those and spread the
word around about those. Katie Bunsen (ph) is my colleague and she's
sitting in the front and either of us would love to hear from you about
the -- there is, in preparation, now a survey of faith-based engagement
in the area which will summarize so many of these partnerships and we'd
like to include as many success stories as possible in those. Thank you
very much. I look forward to your questions afterwards.

(Applause.)

MR. ISAACS: Our next speaker is Susan Adams. Bruce has to go last -- he
has a tentative problem with the computer. (Laughter, inaudible) --
problems with computers when Bruce comes up. Susan is the director of
the New Partner Outreach for the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for
AIDS Relief, also known as PEPFAR at the Office of the Global AIDS
Coordinator. Thank you, Susan. Susan will be asking all of you to send
her your coordinates so she can -- (laughter). Won't you, Susan?
(Laughter.)

SUSAN ADAMS: Great, thank you. Some of you are probably familiar with
PEPFAR. About 50 percent, it looked like, had received some USAID
funding so I imagine you've heard of PEPFAR. Because of our time limit,
I'm not going go into too much on the program but to get to the
specifics around our policies that we've put in place to engage a
various host of partners to really broaden and diversify our partner
base in implementing the program.

I'm going to start and end with our website: www.pepfar.gov. It's just
full of resources on every level and everything that I'll be discussing
for today is available in some form on the website. So to start, just
some statistics: PEPFAR partnered with over 2,000 local organizations,
about 87 percent of our partners were local in 2007 and about 25 percent
of our partners are faith-based organizations. And we believe this is
achieved because the vision and the concepts around the faith-based and
community initiative are put into action at the very beginning of the
launch of the emergency plan. There was a recognition that the goals --
they were big and so to meet them, we had to tap into organizations that
were on the ground, already doing this type of work and really just
trying and implement through them as well.

A couple of examples of some of the policies that were put in place to
try and, again, broaden and diversify that base of partners include our
-- what we call our annual COP review and PEPFAR's put in place a very
detailed reporting process that categorizes the types of partners that
we work with. And during our review of every country's annual
operational plan, we include an evaluation of the types of partners that
are being engaged, including new partners, local partners, faith-based
partners -- we want to ensure that we are reaching those goals. Another
policy piece that was put in place is the 8-percent rule and basically
that is, again, to try and really spread the resources. So that
basically says that no one organization at a country level can receive
more than 8 percent of that country budget. We do have exceptions in
place because we realize we need to work through some of our bigger
partners to engage such a diverse group of partners so organizations
like CRS and World Vision that do have these umbrella mechanisms are
then -- (inaudible) -- rule.

Third, PEPFAR works with our international partners to ensure that they
have strategies to hand over programs to local organizations, to develop
the capacity of those organizations so that eventually, they can have
the opportunity to work directly with the U.S. government. Now, one of
the things, actually, that I had heard Ruth say in an earlier talk is
that it is not in anyone's interest to graduate every single partner and
not all partners should -- or want to -- receive direct government
funding. It's a huge burden on many levels and so really, that's not the
end goal. We talk a lot about graduation strategies, but we don't want
to graduate everyone. We recognize the limitations on that but we do
want to provide organizations with the opportunity, where they have the
capacity to grow to that level and to be able to do so.

And finally, we have technical working groups at PEPFAR and one of them
is the community and faith-based organizations, technical working group,
that participate in these various reviews and policy discussions, sort
of keeping an eye out, looking for opportunities and best practices and
so forth around engaging community, community-based organizations and
faith-based organizations and new partners. So HIV/AIDS is definitely
the focus of PEPFAR but the initiative also invests a great deal of
assistance in technical and organizational capacity building for new
partners and local organizations. We do this, again, mostly through our
larger implementing partners.

One of the mechanisms -- one of the policies that was put into place a
few years ago in 2005 was the new partners initiative. It was launched
by President Bush on World AIDS Day and the goal, again, is really to
reach out, diversify that partner base. And he said, we will reach out
to faith-based and community organizations that provide much of the
health care in the developing world and make sure they have access to
American assistance. By identifying and supporting these organizations,
we will reach more people more effectively and save more lives. The new
partners initiative was, again, created to expand the number of PEPFARs
and to develop local ownership of dealing with the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Eligible organizations include any organization that has not received
more than \$5 million over five years and the exception there is
sub-partners, if you've received it in a sub-relationship or
humanitarian assistance.

And this created an opportunity for new partners or partners that hadn't
traditionally partnered with the U.S. government to compete among their
peers and allowing them a little bit more even playing field. About half
of the NPI grantees thus far are faith-based organizations and about
half are local partners. And we're in the process of awarding our third
round and in total, we'll have 56 new partners from all three rounds to
begin with.

Some of our field initiatives that take place are really diverse. NPI --
the New Partners Initiative was a central initiative. It's a central
annual program statement that's issued and that people -- (inaudible) --
but at the country level, which is where the bulk of our PEPFAR funding
goes to, our country teams have a host of tools in their toolbox to
engage a wide group of partners and they implement them in a variety of
ways that are appropriate to the country needs. One of the examples is
the small grant program and every single one of our PEPFAR countries has
a small grant program. And it, you know, to reach the smaller grassroots
organizations that are out there in the system scaling up their work is
a great entryway to U.S. government assistance. A lot of our countries
will have a database, where an organization that's interested in working
with U.S. government would sent their information and the PEPFAR small
grant database will put them down. And when they're ready to issue the
announcement, whether the, you know, to whatever form, they'll use that
database.

In addition, we have several of our countries that are using an NPI-like
mechanism at the country level, a new partner APS. Again, the same sort
of criteria -- looking for the new partners that haven't previously
worked with the U.S. government at that country-by-country level. South
Africa recently did theirs in the spring around orphans and vulnerable
children. And with that they provide a technical assistance package to
help those new partners sort of get off and running with U.S. government
compliance.

We also have our umbrella mechanisms and we have these in all of our
PEPFAR countries. And it's really all about dealing with the management
burden that comes with taking on so many new and smaller partners. And
so, as you'll hear Bruce talk about his program in Zambia soon, we have
these various structures that allow for some of our larger implementing
partners to reach out through us, as was mentioned earlier, with CRS,
really implement for these local partners. It's a great model. And they
also then invest in developing the capacity of those partners.

And, finally, we have our general sub-partnerships. And almost all of
our partners had some partners. And it's really encouraged. And some of
them have hundreds, you know? So it's a different -- a little bit
different model than the umbrella but, basically, when people come and
ask about how they go about partnering with the U.S. government through
PEPFAR, we encourage them to look at who's operating at the time in that
country and how can we potentially link up with them.

And we have, again, all of this information on the website. We have a
tab on the left of the website that says "partners." And when you click
on that tab, you can go country by country and you see the list of every
single partner that's implementing through PEPFAR its sub-partners; it's
the dollar amount they're receiving in the program area they're working
in and, in some cases, we have mapped with GPS coordinates that tie them
directly to the different regions that they're operating in. So it's
really a great resource.

And, in addition, you know, because of all of these policy questions,
again, on grants.gov nowadays you'll see both USAID and the Centers for
Disease Control are two of our largest implementers. So PEPFAR, CDC
recently just issued a whole list of grant opportunities for local
partners. So I'm sure many of you have organizations in the field, if
you're not directly representing them now, where they could be
encouraged to apply to those opportunities.

So, finally, I'll finish with the website again because it really does
answer a lot of questions. But I am the director of New Partner Outreach
so I am also available to answer any questions that you have on this
initiative.

(Applause.)

MR. ISAACS: Thank you, Susan. Bruce, you're going to switch computers
here?

MR. WILKINSON: I don't know. (Chuckles.) Do we want to go through all of
that hassle or do we just want to --

MR. ISAACS: It's your deal man. What do you want to do?

MR. WILKINSON: I'll --

MR. ISAACS: Okay, we'll try here. Bear with us. Bruce is currently
serving in Zambia as the chief of party for RAPIDS, which stands for
Reaching HIV/AIDS Affected People with Integrated Development and
Support, a USAID/PEPFAR program with a host of other partners. A career
of serving to those in need: 21 years in Africa, six years heading World
Vision's work in Washington, D.C., a social entrepreneur just trying to
make a difference in the world. Bruce, Bruce Wilkinson.

MR. WILKINSON: Yeah, thanks, Ken. It's good to be here. I think we're
just going to -- there is time, we're going to -- we have a little bit
of time. The graphics will be helpful, but I think I'll try to speak and
-- what I'm going to do is we have a -- RAPIDS is in Zambia. I think
many of you were in the previous sessions up front so we're okay? We're
in Zambia.

And, basically, I think we're talking about intermediary-level
relationships and how we work with partners. I think it's important to
sort of outline it. In the beginning, it's always critical to bring in
the right kind of partners to achieve what you want to achieve, correct?
So as you begin to conceive of partner initiatives or you want to become
a partner of a larger initiative, you need to make sure that you are
defining what it is you will add in terms of value. That's sort of what
we call the value proposition.

And so, Living Water, great example -- very, very focused on water. And
they will then partner with other organizations that bring other
wraparound activities around water. CRS has a wonderful potential of
using the Catholic Church as one of their main partners, in fact, the
main partner, and then cascading down to others, which, again, says that
what they're going to do is they're going to build the capacity of those
baths (?) and structures to actually handle the resources in a
relationship with U.S. government funding.

In RAPIDS what we've done is we've actually chosen six main partners,
which gave us geographic coverage throughout the entire country. So we
have six large partners: CRS, World Vision, Africare, CARE, Salvation
Army and then a group called Expanded Church Response, which is in
Zambia; it's a large umbrella that the churches -- they provide the
actual implementation of the RAPIDS program. But then, at the same time,
those larger partners, in their geographic scope, they will only -- we
will not pay for new infrastructure. So I will only select partners in
this partnership that actually have geographic scope and depth in their
work so that, for example, we are not going to be paying for
organizations to go into new areas; what we'll look for in those new
areas are partners who could come and join with us in those geographic
areas.

So, right away, we cover 54 of the 60 -- I'm sorry, I'm in Zambia time.
You've got to forgive me. I should be going to bed here; I just got in.
(Laughter.) -- but in 54 of the 72 districts of Zambia. And the reason
we wanted that geographic scope is we wanted to get a program of scale
and size. When you start looking at -- we have 250,000 orphans and
vulnerable children within the program, 58,000 people living with HIV
and AIDS, 70,000 youth -- that starts to give you the size of the
magnitude of what our care-give movement -- 18,500 care-givers that I
hope you haven't forgotten about already -- these care-givers go out and
serve the needs of those people.

And what we're also doing at the same time is rooting the initial
response, actually at the community level. These care-givers are
resident in their communities; they're not going anywhere, usually.
They're in their community. They become resource people in their
community. So with the RAPIDS coverage, we then said, well, why can't we
actually try to encourage new partners who have not experienced using
U.S. government resources to get involved?

So now we have 254 local partners in Zambia and that's done through the
existing partners. So what I did was I encouraged our existing partners
-- whether that's World Vision, CRS, CARE, Africare -- to then take
their portfolio and then to sub-grant out to local partners who are
doing work with orphans and vulnerable children, home-based care and
youth work.

And guess what we do? We don't do what we call solicitations or tenders
at the national level. We actually ask our partners to do solicitations
at the district level where they're actually resident. So it could be
Africare in a district of Zambia who would then compete their monies at
the district level. Why? A couple of things. One is, we know who the
good players are that we encourage to apply; it's a competitive process.
But we encourage them to apply at that district level.

And we also, our partners know, who are the "suitcase NGOs" as we call
them, those who really don't have the capacity, who are there just
because they've got a good proposal writer, but then they have very
little implementation happening, underlying it. At the same time, our
partners are then charged with the mandate of actually helping to build
the capacity of the partners who are selected. So at that district
level, then those partners who are selected are actually mentored by the
CRSs, by the CAREs, by the World Visions so that they actually increase
their capacity. We do training for them, we deepen the training in terms
of financing government compliance regulations; we do that. And we also
deepen their capacity in terms of their programmatic area they're
involved in, whether that's orphans and vulnerable children, home-based
care.

So now we have 254 organizations operating. So then what do we do? Well,
now we've got to do another marriage, right? This is like, you know,
good African tradition here. We have -- we then wanted another marriage
here of -- we want to take our corporate partners, our foundation
partners and our private donors in helping them to come in and support
the work of all of the existing partners within RAPIDS. So we have our
six larger NGOs. Now we have 254 smaller NGOs. How can we get the
resource bases from those corporate partners, from the foundation
partners and the private partners to actually come in and support their
work?

Now, that's an interesting way to work. So now we have corporate
partners which are donating over \$160 million a year -- the U.S.
government is \$60 million a year -- in supporting this broader network
of existing partners. And we don't get proprietary about the money. What
we do is we give money to the partners who actually produce results. So
if they're taking care of 10,000 OBC, they get the money that's worth
10,000 OBC. We have a certain rate that we put out for their OBC.

So, in other words, the partners are actually held to performance
standards by targets. And those targets are very, very, very, very
well-defined so that we work with our partners and then bring in the
non-government resources to support complimentary activities, because
there are so many complimentary activities you need to do around an HIV
and AIDS platform. HIV and AIDS work is absolutely essential, but, guess
what, so is clean water, so is malaria, so is food security, so is
nutrition.

So what we do is we create the value propositions for those various
organizations, corporate and foundation, to come and work with us in
linking up with where they can fill them gaps, what we call programmatic
gaps, create the value proposition so that our organization can come in
and actually fill very easily that very specific targeted programmatic
gap. And then that starts to build what we would call a holistic
response to the needs of our clients at the household level.

So, again, what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to leave that there
because that's probably overload in the afternoon already. But I'm going
to leave that there for you in terms of how we work with partners. And
the last thing I would just say is that we would not be able, in the
rapids program, to achieve the scale and the scope and the depth of our
program without these type of partnerships. It's just -- I mean, I have
been, spent my career doing this kind of work and I have seen a lot of
very good programming, very, very, very impactful, fairly well-funded
but fairly well-contained in terms of -- it just doesn't get to scale.
It's -- I call them backyard programs. And I have nothing against
backyard programs, but what we want to do is we want to aggregate those
programs. Bring them together, give them the opportunity to partner
together to learn from each other.

We have technical working groups within the RAPIDS program in every
programmatic area; it's just wonderful. The learning environment is so
rich. And now what we're finding is maybe these partners are graduating
in terms of where they can then move on and actually access all of the
resources involved in other initiatives.

We originally had -- of our six main partners, we only had two partners
working in OBC, we only had really one partner working in youth. We only
had one partner working in -- two partners working in home-based care
and one partner working in counseling and testing. Now guess what we
have? We're six for six in every program area. All of our six main
partners now have every one of those program approaches. And guess what
we're now trying to do with our 254?

Now, that's another challenge, but that is a good challenge and to get
them to bring an integrated and holistic approach to HIV and AIDS
programs. So I'll leave that there for you and I'm sure there will be
lots of questions for other folks here. So thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. ISAACS: Do we have any questions? Yes, ma'am.

Q: Excuse me. I'm just wondering if any of you work in Zimbabwe.

MR. ISAACS: Did you say "in Zimbabwe"?

Q: Bruce, do you cross the border?

MR. WILKINSON: My program in particular does not. However, we have on
the table something that we're actually in discussion with the U.S.
government about. But I know CRS, World Vision do a lot of work in
Zimbabwe. I don't know if others do.

Q: No, I'm looking for water. I'm looking for food. I'm looking for
medicine. So I'm just trying to find anywhere that there might be -- and
I have partners in the country.

MS. FORD: Please feel free to visit the CRS office in Zimbabwe. We have
a large office there.

Q: In Harare?

MS. FORD: Yes.

MR. WILKINSON: And the same for World Vision.

MR. ISAACS: He said, the same for World Vision. Yes, ma'am.

Q: I just had a question for what the person from CRS said. I think you
just mentioned when you talked about cost-share in NICRA, that you don't
give NICRA on sub-awards or you don't accept it if you're the
sub-awardee. I just wondered if you could talk about how you think
through that a lot more.

MS. FORD: In the handout there's also a section that talks a little bit
more about NICRA, I believe, as well. But we don't take NICRA on
sub-awards with U.S. partners that have their own NICRA. And for those
U.S.-based organizations without a NICRA rate, we help them negotiate
it. So we're not taking additional NICRA on it. I am not a specialist in
any way so I am happy if you'd like to really talk about it, come and
see me afterwards and I'll give you the name of the person at
headquarters that is like the NICRA queen and she can really help answer
the questions. But it is an important point of negotiation in terms of
who's got a NICRA rate, who does not, what money is taking the NICRA and
who should be taking it.

We're also committed to that equal sharing the cost-share contributions
that we've made. Do you want to speak -- anybody else want to speak more
to NICRA issue or --

MR. ISAACS: Does anyone in here not know what NICRA is? It is the
negotiated indirect cost-related allowance. It's an acronym for
administrative overhead. And there's some audit function in an
organization and there's a formula that the government uses to calculate
what your NICRA is. And based on your audits every year, your NICRA will
adjust a little bit of overhead compared to program. Typically it could
be anywhere from eight to 25 or 30 percent. I mean, NICRA can be all
over the place.

Q: And it seems to cover different things for different organizations.
It doesn't seem to always be the same and it -- you can negotiate your
NICRA with Department of State or with USAID or with various agencies.
So there's a lot of room to play with.

MS. ADAMS: And you don't have to have a NICRA.

Q: No, but you'd want one.

MS. ADAMS: Not necessarily. It depends on your funding levels.

MR. ISAACS: Oh, you don't have to have a NICRA?

MS. ADAMS: Under certain funding levels.

MR. ISAACS: Oh, okay. Yes, sir.

Q: Question for Susan: What are the top three characteristics you're
looking for in new partners?

MR. ISAACS: Top three characteristics.

MS. ADAMS: Oh. We sort of -- we do have different types of new partners.
Under the New Partners Initiative, we have a funding floor and it's
750,000 (dollars) over three years. New, new partners, as I call them,
probably would do better under a small grants program or some of the
smaller in-country efforts, smaller NPI initiatives because the funding
levels are lower.

And you also become a new prime partner under the New Partners
Initiative, which means you will get an annual audit and you will have
to do all of these other compliance measures that are quite cumbersome
for new, new partners. So for those smaller, very nascent organizations
that are looking to engage with the U.S. government, I would say the
three characteristics there we're looking for are for people who work in
what we call sort of underserved areas or areas where we don't have some
of our other providers in place and doing this work. We need to fill
gaps and, a lot of times, those partners are the ones that are out in
those very rural areas or underserved areas and we can tap into what
they're doing and expand their work through some of the small grants
programs.

For the larger partners that do work and compete through the New Partner
Initiatives, a lot of those organizations sometimes are already in
sub-relationships and they use this competition as a means to graduate
to a direct funding relationship with the U.S. government. And, in those
instances, we look for organizations that have a bit of a history in the
program areas that have experience, that have experience managing a
certain amount of funding already or reporting or are familiar with some
of the systems and structures, but maybe haven't had the opportunity to
compete direct funding because of some of the other larger partners that
are out there that would be competing against them.

And, I'm sorry, Ken -- (inaudible) -- you know, it's really -- for us
it's about organizations, particularly for the New Partners Initiative
that have a reach, that are able to work through and build the capacity
of smaller local organizations. That's what the APS was structured
around for the New Partners Initiative so it was both meeting program
and targets as well as building the capacity of other local
organizations. So we do look for partners who have some sort of a
structure to work through at that level.

MR. ISAACS: Yes, ma'am.

Q: I have a question for Sarah Ford. I'm wondering if any of the
examples of partnerships that you have with CRS have been interfaith or
if you have primarily focused on connecting with Catholic churches in
different regions where you do work.

MS. FORD: Could everyone hear the question? It was about -- thank you --
whether CRS works with partners of other faiths beyond the Catholic
Church. And the answer is a resounding yes. Our partner in every country
is formally the Catholic Church. We have either a solidarity
relationship with the church or an actual project-based relationship
with the church. But we are in 90 countries around the world, some
places where the church is large, other places where it's nonexistent --
well, virtually nonexistent, I should say.

In every one of those 90 countries, we work also with secular partners
and with partners of other faiths as well. So we're definitely engaged
with Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu and Protestant organizations around the
world, solidly.

Q: Is there any documentation of those partnerships?

MS. FORD: Specifically the interfaith partnerships documented or --

Q: Even a broader database in which those interfaith partnerships might
be included.

MS. FORD: Yes, we do have more of an internal -- she's asking if we --
the kind of record-keeping and tracking we do of those partnerships. We
do have internal tracking systems and then we also try and do some
documentation of the partnerships we have. I'll have to do a little
research to see if we have a good case study for you on an interfaith
partnership. Sitting on some of the chairs is an example of partnerships
with some secular organizations but we also have, as I say, a lot of
interfaith partnerships as well.

Q: Thank you.

MS. FORD: Sure.

MR. ISAACS: This lady in the back in the orange.

Q: You talked earlier about your -- (inaudible, off mike) -- with your
long-term care-givers. Can you briefly describe what's the key, what are
the key elements of a successful relationship -- (inaudible, off mike)?

MR. WILKINSON: I'm supposed to know the answer to that question. That's
scary when you really don't. We just had population counts of our -- the
other ones who were doing the evaluation of the RAPIDS program, external
evaluators. And I asked them to do an operations research piece on our
carriers because I really wanted to know, you know, why we're attracting
so many care-givers. Number one, we have a lot of people who want to be
part of the program. Number two, the retention rates are absolutely --
yeah. Even we wish we could say that we knew why exactly we're so
successful. (Chuckles.) We once in a while lead a blind squirrel that
finds a nut, right? (Laughter.) No, stop kicking me under the table.
(Laughter.)

What we found in that study, and we can relate it back to a few things.
The first is there's selection. Many of these people do do this out of a
faith motivation. We -- many of our care-givers are joined to church
groups or other religious groups in Zambia, Zambia being prominently
Christian. Secondly, a lot of these people have been doing other
community service activities. This isn't the first time they've actually
done it, but this is the time when they've probably been the better
trained, better equipped and better organized. And so they really find
that they develop a deep affinity.

And then what we're doing is we're doing a lot of recognition. In fact,
if you all want to join us in Zambia on the 25^th^ of November, we're
recognizing our 18,500 care-givers all over Zambia in 132 locations that
will receive a beautiful certificate of appreciation with their name on
it and that they've been trained; that's very important to them. They
really like those kinds of certificates.

They are also going to be receiving a -- in Zambia they call it a
chikenge (ph) -- but a piece of cloth that has rapids on it and sort of
identifies them and they can have that. And then they'll also be
receiving a lot of in-kind donations from our corporate partners that
they'll put on their bicycles and take back to their clients because if
you're doing volunteer service in HIV/AIDS-infected households, you need
to know that you're going to be dealing with a lot of pain, a lot of
suffering, a lot of people who are on the edge, asset depletion. These
are very, very, very poor people and very stressed people.

So if you give them the opportunity to have the tools and the training,
that sort of starts to really make a huge difference, actually going
with something, because I think, even myself, I was asked to go there
continually and I didn't have much to offer. Prayer is great, but --
yeah, so, anyways, I think that's part of it. And then I say the other
thing is, because our partners -- CRS, CARE, World Vision -- have
already been working, have preexisting relationships with these
communities. So, again, the people -- there's a trust factor here. There
really is a high level of trust. And I think that high level of trust
leads to high volunteer retention rate.

Yeah, the kits. Sorry, Susan also mentioned the kits. We have these care
kits that we give out and these care kits, each caregiver gets a kit to
take care of all of their clients that they have and they get a bicycle
from World Bicycle Relief. They get wonderful toys. They also -- their
families benefited from the mosquito net, the 500,000-mosquito net
distribution. So they do get some benefit from being a caregiver. We
don't pay them any salary; it's non-monetary.

Q: That's what I wanted to just ask about. So how much time -- I mean,
are most of them working regular jobs then in addition and about how
much time do they put into that? Just the logistics of it.

MR. WILKINSON: Each caregiver -- why we limited each caregiver to five
families was because some of these caregivers, literally, in the
beginning, were spending two days of their week going and caring for
them, because, you see, they've been doing this already. It isn't RAPIDS
initiated. I mean, it isn't the U.S. government. This is the culture of
Zambia. So we're resonating with an existing movement. I call it a
social movement. And we're going to get into social networking theories
here and we're going to start doing and getting these folks to
communicate and all because what you're doing is you're reinforcing a
cultural attribute which, many times, development programs and big-money
programs will come in and actually destroy, right?

What I think we've actually hit on here is we're actually reinforcing
something which is beautiful about their culture and something that --
so what we did was we had to say, look, guys, five households; that's
it. You know, five households is your limit in terms of the care. And
that usually results in about a half-a-day a week. Most of them are
actually about a day a week.

Last year alone, 420,000 -- not hours, days -- of volunteer service were
provided by these 18,500 caregivers.

MS. : Wow.

MR. WILKINSON: Four hundred and 20,000 days. It's just -- I mean, their
dedication and inspiration sort of -- that's what's infectious in this
program. And that's why we have so many partners willing to join.

MR. ISAACS: Yes, sir. Back here.

TERRI HASDORFF: We're just going to take one or two more questions.
We've already kind of gone to the right. We want to make sure that you
all do have a chance to go to the informational fair. There are
representatives from the bureaus and the different departments around
USAID. Feel free to come up afterwards if our panels are willing to stay
and ask them questions. But do feel free to go back to the atrium hall
and check out the information out there before the next session begins.
We'll meet at 3:00.

MR. ISAACS: Yes, sir.

Q: Yes. I'm asking yet another question. I know that I'm going to see
you again in my place. My question is about the corporation. You are
saying that the corporations also are giving you grants to do your work
and help you bring more over. My question is, those corporations, do
they have business in the country or you are just taking any
corporations that are willing to come and give you support?

MR. ISAACS: He's asking you I think about corporations. Do they have
business in the country?

MR. WILKINSON: Yeah, how do the others have corporations involved. Most
of these corporations do not have business in the countries. We do have
a few local corporations who actually have their markets in the country
that are working with us now and the majority of the external
corporations do not have business interests in Zambia.

MR. ISAACS: Yes, ma'am. This one and that'll be it.

Q: I just have a question. You are all from larger organizations and you
spoke about the value of partnering and using sub-partners. And I guess
from someone who's learning from small groups, what are the impediments
that you find, or the problems or the challenges that you find when you
do begin to engage with these smaller organizations that we could
potentially avoid or help alleviate when we try to engage with larger
organizations?

MR. ISAACS: Yeah, I'll speak to that a little bit. I have experience in
it because I was the first person to start working overseas for
Samaritans First and now we've got 2500 people. So when I used to go
knock on the door of USAID or another organization, they would go, hi,
boom, they'd close the door. I mean, you really can't get access; you
can't get traction. They don't know who you are and you sort of find
yourself groveling. It is a difficult situation. It's not easy. And I
would dare say that a lot of you -- there were acronyms and terms and
initials that you've heard thrown around today here and you don't know
what they're talking about; it's like there's another language. You
know, they could be speaking Swahili or something.

My advice to you is, first of all, be patient and be diligent. Second of
all, try to get educated and learn all that you can. And when you go
talk to a larger partner or to USAID, particularly at USAID, they'll
say, it's on the Web; go to the Web. And then you get on the Web and
you're just drowned in information. But the truth is it really is on the
Web. And the more that you can familiarize yourself with the terms and
the thinking, the better off you'll be. Someone said a moment ago from
the podium, they were talking about getting out in front of the donor or
the partner by understanding what their objectives are. And that is a
key issue.

The U.S. government, when they pass money down, whether it's through the
PEPFAR program or the economic assistance program, whatever it is, there
are instructions that go with that money. And the instructions with that
money will be formulated into a strategy on how that money's going to be
spent. The more that you understand what the strategy -- the intentions
of the donor is with the money or what the, you know, if you're going to
a World Vision or a CRS or a Living Water, whatever. If you -- the more
that you understand about them, you have to find how you play into their
role. You need to serve them some way and in return, you know, you'll
get closer to having a relationship with them.

And I guess that would be the last thing is from my personal experience,
you know, you hear all of these terms and the legalese and the
appropriations and the congressional talk and the USAID talk and all the
bigness of the NGOs. At the end of the day, it's about relationships.
It's about the people that you know in different organizations and them
getting to know you. For those of you, the lady over hear a moment ago
that stood up and asked about Zimbabwe. I don't see her in here.

MS. DUFF: She's way in the back.

MR. ISAACS: She's way back there. Oh yeah, she's trying to sneak out,
okay. (Laughter.) The -- most of the decisions on USAID money is made at
the mission level. Zimbabwe would be an exception because you don't --
there's not a USAID mission there right now. But for most of the
countries in the world, there is. For you to take the opportunity to go
meet the mission director or at least the most senior person that you
can -- and it isn't like you're just going to go in one time and give
them a letter and say hi, I'm Bob. I need \$20,000 for this. They don't
care. That isn't what they're doing. You fail to understand what their
mission strategy is for the year. They have like this five-year
strategic plan and where is it? It's on the Web. But it takes a lot of
research to get it. So that's sort of my advice on those kind of issues.

Anybody else have comments on it?

MS. DUFF: Bruce and I were mentioning to each other, too, that at least
for both of our organizations, those relationships really need to be
established at the country-program level. We don't establish
partnerships at the headquarters level. All of our relationships are
established at the country-program level.

Q: I have a question. (Inaudible, off mike.)

MS. DUFF: I this -- your questions goes back to Ken's comment that
understanding each organization is really key. For us, it really is at
the country-program level -- we're a highly decentralized organization.
And if I were to call Zambia now and say I've established a relationship
with this gentleman's organization, you need to work them, they would
hang up the phone on me. But other organizations are quite different and
do establish relationships at the headquarter level so it really is
important to do that research and understand the culture and operating
procedures of the organization with whom you'd like to partner.

Q: (Inaudible, off mike) -- American entities -- (inaudible) -- say
Zambian -- (inaudible).

MS. DUFF: We use the term "local" interchangeably with "indigenous" so,
yes, organizations that are based in those countries.

Q: So how can -- (inaudible, off mike).

MS. DUFF: They're open to both. USAID, international or local -- I think
the majority of our local partners are sub-partners, not as many are the
prime partners, even though that is an eventual goal.

MR. ISAACS: Okay, with that, let's conclude it and thank you all. We
appreciate the time.

(Applause.)

(END)