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Financial Award Disclosure

by Editor Thu 18 Jun 2009

Nonprofit organizations such as ours have an ethical obligation to our constituents, donors, partners and beneficiaries to conduct ourselves with transparency and accountability. We began this project blog with the intent of keeping the public informed about our activities, accomplishments, decisions and so on. This is in keeping with our desire to build external transparency, public understanding and trust in our organization.

Village Diary is an initiative of the LINK-UP Charity Foundation, an NGO registered in the SW region of the Republic of Cameroon. We’re accountable to the government of Cameroon, but lack 501(c)3 tax exemption status in the United States and thus are not required to file IRS 990 tax returns. These reports are public information for those that know how to find them (on websites such as guidestar.org, for example). To make them more accessible, a best practice for nonprofits is to post them publicly on their blog, along with accounting audits, board activities, annual reports and related information.

As a foreign NGO lacking this special status, we’ve decided to take the lead among Cameroonian recipients of U.S. Embassy funding by making a full public disclosure of the recent financial assistance award granted to Village Diary. This includes the U.S. Department of State financial assistance award form, specifics of the award, correspondence between AfroVisioN Group and LINK-UP with the U.S. Embassy in Yaoundé, and a detailed costing of how the funds will be used for the project.

The amount of this award is US $10,503.39, and was granted for the purpose of providing seed money to launch Village Diary; specifically development of the IT platform, hardware to be used for fieldwork and web server hosting for one year. Details and conditions of the award are contained in the PDF document (below).

It should also be noted that our fundraising efforts were conducted entirely by volunteer staff. 100% of the funds granted in this award will go toward implementation of the Village Diary project, as detailed in our budget allocation.

Every nonprofit is a public trust working to produce something of benefit to the public, and the public is, in a very real sense, the ultimate shareholders of our organization—even more so than our board members, partners or staff.

We’re making these documents available as a single PDF download: federal-assistance-docs.pdf (1.37 MB). We feel it’s a positive step toward increasing transparency and accountability for our organization.

Questions, comments or other feedback are greatly appreciated.

An Ethical Approach to Serving Others

by Editor Tue 21 Apr 2009

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“There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.” -John F. Kennedy

“Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness.” –Seneca

Viola Allo, a Cameroonian-born ethnographer and writer based in California, joined our team to help us design a project sensitive to the needs of our beneficiaries. In doing so, she draws on her training in cultural anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork she performed in Nigeria and Cameroon. Much of her research and personal interest lies in issues faced by rural African women, so her contributions are invaluable to our effort.

As the Village Diary operations manual began to take shape, Viola suggested that we needed a section devoted to ethical considerations for the project. We decided from the start that our project would be guided by the highest standards of ethics in our conduct within the community. Few would disagree with such a sentiment. However, for a project such as ours—or any humanitarian or development effort, for that matter—what does this mean, practically?

To address this question, we began with an overview of International Development Ethics and studied the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Convention on the Rights of the Child and related documents. Viola added the American Anthropological Association’s Code of Ethics (PDF) and provided a sample consent form used in her fieldwork. These sources helped us frame the needs for an ethical approach in our work, but we still lacked a practical how-to guide.

Many hours and revisions later, Viola has crafted just such a guide. From her opening section on Ethics & Values:

“Our ethical standards reveal the conscience of our project and our efforts. Over time, the values we uphold for the project should become a part of our team’s moral code—a list of things we see as true, a core of philosophies and practices we will commit to, and a set of principles we will not compromise. These things will guide the decisions we make.”

She goes on to outline a code of ethics that includes key elements such as transparency, openness, privacy, confidentiality, context and respect. Viola outlines her concept of a “People First” approach:

“We will put the wellbeing of clients first. Project goals and progress are important but secondary. Our personal ambitions, too, are secondary. Our primary concern is the wellbeing of those we serve… We must strive, as best we can, to see those we serve as people we can learn from. They are the experts on their lives and worlds, and as such, they are our teachers.”

Using this as a foundation, Viola expands on ethical considerations for services offered to vulnerable individuals including women, children and victims of abuse. She then tackles the thorny issue of collecting information from these individuals, with a focus on informed consent, data collection methods and the roles of fieldworkers and custodians.

Since the Village Diary IT platform is designed to collect, store and disseminate information related to our beneficiaries, Viola’s guide also addresses ethics in computer and Internet data storage, transparency and sharing data with donors, guardians, sponsors, and beneficiaries.

Viola’s work on this topic provides both a core philosophy and a practical guide to ethics in service to others. Perhaps its greatest value is that it is applicable not only to our project; it may be used to inform an ethical approach for any organization engaged in humanitarian, aid or development work. In the spirit of transparency and collaboration, we’re offering Viola’s complete ethics guide in PDF format.

Download Ethics, Values and Serving Others (PDF) by Viola Allo.

As a working document, Viola and the Village Diary team value any and all feedback on it. If you find it useful, have comments or additions to it, feel free to post your thoughts below.

Empowerment: A Starting Point

by Viola Allo Thu 26 Feb 2009

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Dahomey women warriors These are my very first words here, on the Village Diary Blog. I am excited to lend my voice to this project and its cause—so excited, I confess, that I’d begun to get romantic about my role. A few days ago, I thought of myself as an amazon for the Village Diary Project, not unlike one of the amazons of the famous West African kingdom of Dahomey. I wondered, Could I be a female warrior or guard for the Village Diary? Could I be a woman of high status whose insightful opinions are coveted by kings? And what if I were more than a servant of kings? I am the first woman to join the Village Diary team, so I started to think of myself as a great matriarch, an African queen of sorts. Would I be expected to bring blessings to this project, perhaps just like the Queen of Lobedu in South Africa is expected to bring the blessing of rain to her people? Could I make the other team members comb the streets of Cameroon’s South West Province and return to me with tributes like gold nuggets of roasted yellow corn, hot and fresh from the busy mines of Cameroonian women’s hillside farms and roadside fires?

With a mischievous grin, I considered the possibilities of these roles, but very quickly, I came to see the responsibility of it all. Yes, I am a fighter of a woman, but I am not a warrior. I can’t say for sure that I know how to protect and defend anyone, or whether I even have the courage to do so. And though I was born and raised in Cameroon, I live so far from home that any blessings I might be able to impart to this project will have to make the long, almost interminable journey from California to Cameroon, and they’ll have to do so with no guarantee of safe arrival and delivery.

It was with these humbling realizations that I returned to earth and began to think about the beneficiaries of this project: they are women and children, widows and orphans living in communities served by the Buea-based NGO, Link-Up Development Group. The Village Diary, a
project of this NGO, will seek to assist these women and children with the hard work that they, as individuals, are doing to meet their needs. I see the Village Diary as a resource to these individuals and their communities. However, it is not the only resource these women might have access to. In my opinion, the Village Diary is best viewed as a supplement to the other resources widows and orphans have at their disposal, however limited these resources may be.

I frame our mission in this way because I feel this view not only empowers the women and children we will be of service to but also gives these individuals and their communities credit for the hard work they have done in the absence of our services. While these widows and orphans often face various insurmountable difficulties, I resist any discourse that violates their individual agency or fails to acknowledge their resourcefulness and that of their communities.

A goal I envision for the ethnographic component of the Village Diary Project is the goal of learning from these women and children about the forms of support they have at their disposal and the forms of support they are in need of. From this, we will be able to gather what we can offer to them that would enhance the types of support they already receive from their families, friends, communities and any other social networks they belong to. They will tell us how our services can fit into or augment the networks of support they rely on. In this manner, our services will be grounded in our knowledge and understanding of the contexts—familial, social or other—of the lives of widows and orphans in the South West Province of Cameroon.

This is what I will keep in mind, as I begin to talk with our team about the ways in which the ethnographic component of the Village Diary might be designed and implemented. Even as I write this, I am creating a list of things that I see as essential to any ethnographic inquiry—things that are very relevant to a project that deals with individuals who find themselves in vulnerable positions in their families and communities. I am open to suggestions, recommended readings, and questions. Please do not hesitate to contact our team and share your thoughts with us.

Now, back to the subject of roasted corn…can I have some?

Viola Allo Joins Our Team

by Editor Mon 16 Feb 2009

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The Village Diary took a giant leap forward this week with the addition of ethnographer, writer and native-born Cameroonian Viola Allo to our team. Her involvement on the project is significant on many levels. For starters, she brings some much-needed gender balance to our group as the first woman to come on board. While the rest of the team is working here in Cameroon, Viola is based in California, making her the first Cameroonian abroad to get involved with the project. She’s also a professional ethnographer who will advise us on best practices prior to conducting field trials with the Village Diary. Viola is an authority on many of the complex issues faced by women and children in Cameroon and Africa, generally. As a tool with a special emphasis on cultural context, the Village Diary stands to benefit tremendously from her training in anthropology. With this expertise, she’ll help shape the project into a highly focused, effective tool for addressing their needs.

Viola has a BA in psychology from the University of California and an MA in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan. She’s performed ethnographic fieldwork in Ibadan, Nigeria and Buea, Cameroon. She’s currently working on a collection of essays that celebrates her passion for Africa and storytelling.

Drawing on her background in Africanist anthropology, she’ll assist with our project’s use of ethnographic methods that are sensitive to the needs of women and children in Cameroon. She’s a prolific, opinioned writer with much to say on the issues faced by women in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa. She’ll be a contributing writer to this blog, so watch for her posts in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can follow Viola’s updates on Twitter.

Please join me in extending a big welcome to Viola as she joins our effort. African women ethnographers are a rare find, particularly those from our region of Cameroon. We’re extremely fortunate to have her advising us, and can’t think of a better qualified person to fill this role.

We’re still looking for a few good technical people who can assist with software components of the Village Diary. Visit our how to help page or see the developer’s wiki for more details.

Archive for the ‘Cultural context’ Category

Financial Award Disclosure

An Ethical Approach to Serving Others

Empowerment: A Starting Point

Viola Allo Joins Our Team

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