After a long and competitive selection process and multiple rounds of feedback, a few of the successful applicants have finally begun to sign a partnership agreement with LIFT, others are to sign soon. This is an important milestone in the LIFT Uplands programme development. As LIFT will be working together with these implementing partners (IPs) over the next three years, an introduction meeting on 'working with LIFT' for IPs was essential.
In the meeting held on July 4, Uplands Programme Officer, Antoine Deligne welcomed all new IPs and gave an overview of LIFT and its programmes. Each of the IPs also had the opportunity to introduce themselves and their respective projects and had the chance to meet one another over a tea break. New projects cover northern areas in Chin, Kayin, Kachin, Shan and Tanintharyi region and involve nutrition, aquaculture, getting farmers to market through a value chain approach, vocational skills training and agroforestry.
Throughout the presentation, Mr. Deligne gave an overview of what IPs could expect through shared learning, communities of practice, LIFT field visits, communications support, project monitoring and reporting.
Together with the Uplands programme team, knowledge management, and the monitoring and evaluation unit of the LIFT fund managment office shared the relevant information guidence to partners. M&E highlighted the required documents and guidelines that are important for IPs through out their project's life span - from inception period to project end. A note-worthy tool for new IPs is the Monitoring and Evaluation for Learning and Accountability
More documents are available at www.lift-fund.org/guidelines.
The agenda also covered the coordination mechanisms between LIFT and IPs. Despite LIFT's rigorous requirements, Mr. Deligne assured that LIFT will strongly support the new IPs and work closely with them to help them meet the expectations. The Leveraging Essential Nutrition Actions to Reduce Malnutrition (LEARN) programme, a cross-cutting thematic programme funded by LIFT, was also available to inform new IPs of services available to them concerning nutrition capacity building, data collection, basic nutrition training, thematic workshops, and technical support. LIFT also promises to offer support within the areas of land (Land Core Group), gender (Gender Equality Network), farming systems analyses, conflict sensitivity, training or financial reporting and other procedures and templates.
LIFT would like to welcome its new IPs and ongoing IPs to the Uplands programme: Catholic Relief Services/KMSS, CORAD/GRET, MIID/Cornell University, Metta Development, CDN/Cordaid/World Concern Myanmar, KDN/Covenant Consult/TKPSI, Swissaid/Metta, TAG/Plan Bee, ICRAF, Mercy Corps, Vision Fund, Proximity Finance, Chin MFI, Yoma Bank and PRIME technologies.
More about the Uplands programme available here.
