GPSA countries

Grant Making / GPSA 4th Call for Proposals Countries / The Caribbean

4th Global Call for Proposals: The Caribbean

Resilience and Environment

Enhance CSO role in governance of natural capital: Participatory monitoring of the strategic focus, implementation and impact of international public funds channeled through CSOs for natural resources management in Antigua and Barbuda, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & Grenadines. Focus on learning lessons and building capacity among CSOs on targeting and efficiency of spending, while creating synergy with government expenditures in the same areas and on the same assets. The proposal should support the Caribbean Biodiversity Hotspot project for resilience by implementing capacity building activities focused on collaborative social accountability mechanisms for CSOs involved in the Hotspot project. This could include monitoring how funds are being executed by government and civil society, focusing on learning, coordination and collaboration during project implementation. The approaches developed and implemented during the project should be replicable by other institutions and have the potential to be transferable to other comparable project situations.

More about the Hotspot project:

The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), launched in 2000, focuses on providing strategic assistance to engage NGOs, community groups, and other civil society partners in conserving Earth’s biodiversity hotspots. The CEPF is a partnership between Conservation International (CI), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the World Bank (Development Grant Facility), the Government of Japan, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The overall development objective has been to strengthen the involvement of NGOs and other sectors of civil society in conservation and management of important ecosystems and habitats in recognized global biodiversity hotspots. This objective would be achieved by providing strategic assistance to NGOs, community groups and other civil society partners to support:(a) strengthened protection and management of biodiversity within selected hotspots and critical ecosystems, both within and beyond protected areas; (b) increasing local and national capacity to conserve and manage biodiversity, especially among civil society; and (c) expanding and improving monitoring and learning to demonstrate biodiversity impact and enable adaptive management and replication.

Countries included in the proposal: Antigua and Barbuda, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Grenada, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & Grenadines. Jamaica is now included in this list of countries!

General Grant Objectives

Grants are intended to provide strategic and sustained support to CSO projects with the following objectives:

Addressing critical governance and development challenges through social accountability processes that involve citizen feedback and participatory methodologies geared to helping governments and public-sector institutions address these challenges. Special emphasis is on problems that affect extreme poor and marginalized populations.

Strengthening civil society’s capacities for social accountability by investing in CSOs’ institutional strengthening and through mentoring of small, nascent CSOs by well-established, larger CSOs with a track record on social accountability. The GPSA will prioritize proposals that a) are implemented by CSOs’ networks, alliances or partnerships, b) include on-granting from lead implementing CSO and CSO partners.

General Grant Selection

The call prioritizes collaborative social accountability approaches, with the objective of generating systematic citizen feedback and its use by public sector institutions at the local, state and federal levels. Collaborative social accountability consists of inclusive citizen participation processes, whereby civil society organizations (CSOs) facilitate collaborative problem-solving spaces between citizens, particularly marginalized and vulnerable groups, and public sector institutions responsible for decision-making. The information produced should be used to introduce corrective measures and improvements in policy-making and implementation, including responses co-produced and co-implemented between citizens and the public sector. 

Proposals will have to demonstrate that they will use inclusive participation approaches to engage citizens, particularly marginalized and vulnerable groups, in generating systematic feedback and engaging them in collaborative problem-solving. They will also have to link participatory mechanisms to ongoing initiatives led by public sector institutions at the local, state and federal levels aimed at reforming governance in public security. Proposed interventions may combine a target geographic area but must be clearly linked to (a) public sector initiatives at higher levels (state or federal), and (b) the possibility of scaling up such mechanisms to cover larger geographic areas. The high-level objective will be to contribute to increasing transparency, accountability and inclusive citizen participation in the relevant sectors, as well as improving state and civil society capacities, knowledge and learning on the use of collaborative social accountability mechanisms in the sectors outlined in the national thematic descriptions.

Before applying, please make sure to read the Application Guidelines and visit the Call for Proposals page. Watch below a recording of the orientation session.

4TH CALL FOR PROPOSALS