YOU ARE HERE:
The Kenya AIDS NGOs Consortium (KANCO)
   Last updated: 16.08.02
Implementers
The Kenya AIDS NGOs Consortium (KANCO) is a coalition of some 600 NGOs/CBOs and religious organizations that deal with HIV/AIDS/STI activities in Kenya.

Background
KANCO was founded in 1990 by a group of seven health and development NGOs that had added an HIV/AIDS component to their existing programs. The consortium’s goal is to improve the response to the epidemic by enhancing NGO networking and collaboration among NGOs, religious, institutions, and the Kenyan government, as well as to promote leadership and solidarity.

In 1997, KANCO identified the need to expand and strengthen services, enhance its visibility, and increase capacity on the district level without creating field offices. To accomplish this, the consortium developed an implementation plan to deliver services in districts where there are many KANCO member organizations. This process is described below, under “Internal organizational implications.”

Objectives and main activities
KANCO’s efforts are designed to complement the government response to HIV/AIDS to ensure a positive policy environment for HIV/AIDS/STI prevention, care, and support; promote capacity building; and provide broad access to HIV/AIDS/STI information and materials.

The consortium’s key activities include:
• Establishing and facilitating a networking system to provide forums for sharing resources and enhancing collaborative efforts both at the national and district levels. Maintaining a resource center to collect and disseminate HIV/AIDS information, education, and communication materials; the center currently handles a monthly average of 350 enquiries.
• Promoting capacity building among members to improve quality of services and respond to the epidemic more effectively.
• Working to complement the government in developing and articulating national policies for HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and support.

Resources and timeframe
KANCO has been supported by several donors, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department for International Development of the UK, and others.

Outputs/outcomes
KANCO’s commitment to national policy development on HIV/AIDS has led to several important initiatives. The consortium has built strong ties with government agencies involved in policy formulation and health programming, such as the National AIDS and STD Control Programme (NASCOP) and the National AIDS Control Council (NACC). The executive director of KANCO sits on the NACC, which coordinates HIV/AIDS activities in the country, to promote the perspective of Kenya’s NGOs. KANCO’s policy initiations contributed significantly to the development of the 1997 Sessional Paper No. 4, “AIDS in Kenya.” KANCO has also sponsored several symposia to build the capacity of members of Parliament to respond to the epidemic in their constituencies.

Internal organizational implications
In late 1997, KANCO invited consultants in organizational development (OD) to assist in designing a strategy to better support member organizations and other clients, particularly at the district level. Rather than force KANCO to strictly adhere to linear planning procedures toward this goal, KANCO leaders saw OD as a process that would allow the consortium and the organizations within it to consciously manage their growth and development without sacrificing KANCOs’ organizational knowledge and culture. OD became a valuable tool that has allowed KANCO to identify constraints or crisis points in its structure and to decide whether it needs to shift to different ways of organizing itself to improve effectiveness.

The OD intervention helped KANCO examine areas that regular planning rarely touches, yet that are extremely crucial for organizational well-being. These include such issues as values, identity, image, relationships, and organizational culture. In strategy making, for instance, an OD inter-vision will take longer than conventional linear planning approaches but will help the organization as a whole become more conscious of the values that drive its mission and the norms that keep it alive. This also helped to bring values and norms into alignment with internal capacity, structure, administration, and communication. The process also helped KANCO to acknowledge problem areas, some of which involved deep emotions and change.

The first step was a “belief session” designed to introduce staff to OD and answer questions about the process. Next came a comprehensive survey to help assess existing organizational capacity and infrastructure within KANCO. This two-day effort, facilitated by the consultant, focused on interviews with individual employees, including the director and all staff working in the administration, policy and advocacy, and resource center departments, as well as organizational diagnosis questionnaires. These sought to explore why individual staff chose to work at KANCO, whether personal objectives are achievable at KANCO, and how staff perceive KANCO objectives. They revealed that most staff are confident about their skill levels, have high regard for KANCO’s networking orientation, feel pride that they work for a high-profile organisation that has enjoyed success in its field, and are confident in KANCO’s financial management. The surveys were followed by a diagnostic workshop made up of staff, board members, and volunteers that focused on analyzing and summarizing the results of the diagnosis questionnaire.

Next steps included participatory development of a five-year strategic plan, which concentrated on five key questions. Key components of this planning process included allowing participants to express expectations and fears; introducing a planning framework to enable the entire team to understand the planning process; analyzing KANCO stakeholders and prioritizing commitments to them; reviewing KANCO’s mission and organizational vision; analyzing the external environment of factors likely to influence KANCO in the future and envisioning future factors; examining internal competence, strengths, and weaknesses; and developing strategic goals in a participatory process. These efforts led to three key goals for KANCO:
• Goal 1: A competent secretariat capable of responding to the technical needs of members and HIV/AIDS issues.
• Goal 2: Functioning national and district networks capable of providing regular forums for experience sharing and access to information.
• Goal 3: Enhanced advocacy capacity for members to respond to HIV/AIDS policy issues effectively.

Key outcomes from the OD process have included:
• A job analysis and evaluation, involving staff-wide job analysis questionnaires and a job evaluation exercise, which led to development of a grade level system based on evaluation results.
• A salary survey, which provided the basis for recommendations on a salary structure and prompted creation of a staff pension and medical scheme.
• Creation of finance and personnel policy manuals.
• Development of a sustainability plan, including technical assistance to improve financial management and staff benefits, and a working committee on sustainability.
• A staff appraisal system.
• More staff training to, among other things, enhance KANCO’s ability to respond to donor requirements for financial management, analysis, and reporting.
• Project management meetings.
• Joint donors’ meetings to explain KANCO activities, constraints, and future plans.

The benefits to KANCO of the OD process are numerous. The consortium now enjoys increasing transparency within the organization, an overall change in perspectives and attitudes, new learning processes, internalization of the organization’s mission, and a new sense of ownership by staff and members of the organization, leading to greater effectiveness.

Source: A Question of Scale
This is an extract from A Question of Scale: The challenge of expanding the impact of non-governmental organisations’ HIV/AIDS efforts in developing countries,
by Jocelyn DeJong, published by the Horizons Project of the Population Council with the International HIV/AIDS Alliance in 2001. To view the whole report follow this link.

To download, complete with graphics, in pdf format (which requires Adobe Acrobat software to read it) follow this link (file size 1.43 Mbytes).