creco

CRECO’s Thematic Focus:

CRECO’s thematic focus is informed by the situational analysis above and the strategic need to balance capabilities with available opportunities in order to define its core business.

For the next five years of this strategic plan, CRECO will focus on three broad themes that will form the bedrock of its programmes and activities. These are:

(i) Institutional Capacity building
(ii) Policy and Legal Reform
(iii) Democracy and Governance.

The factors used to guide the selection of the three thematic areas are as follows:

• CRECO’s identity and mandate as a coalition of civil society organisations with a history of action on constitutional and governance issues.
• Membership priorities and needs.
• The nature of democracy and governance in Kenya and the governance issues that negatively affect the lives of poor and disadvantaged people most.
• The existing expertise, skills, institutional infrastructure and resource capacity within CRECO, and potential for medium term to long-term institutional capacity enhancement.
• The focus and levels of intervention by other development actors, including CRECO members, in the geopolitical areas of CRECO’s possible interventions.
• The potential for CRECO’s programmes and project activities to sufficiently empower the poor and the disadvantaged for them to contribute effectively to their own development.
• The need to shift from past practice and reduce tensions revolving around identity and duplication of roles with member civil society organisations.

1. Institutional Capacity Building

The idea of CRECO as a coalition was mooted in recognition of the capacity inadequacies and vulnerability in singularity that bedevils most civil society organisations in Kenya. Through this thematic theme, CRECO seeks to meaningfully contribute towards the development of the civil society sector in the country and the region. Civil society organisations that are persistently struggling with basic capacity problems will never be able to assume their rightful position and effectively play their roles as equal partners in national and regional development.

Strategic Goal 1: To strengthen the capabilities of member civil society organisations to discharge their mandates more effectively and on a sustainable basis by the year 2010.

Within the institutional capacity building theme CRECO will develop and implement programmes aimed at building the capacities and institutional culture of member CSOs to achieve optimum standards through the following strategies:

• Coordinate and conduct joint programming, monitoring and evaluation with member CSOs and other civil society organisations.
• Conduct continuous capacity needs assessment and technical backstopping for member CSOs.
• Promote institutional development training and monitoring for member CSOs and CRECO staff.
• Conduct project cycle management training for CRECO staff and member CSOs.
• Establish mechanisms for collective information management and establishment of an info bank and resource centre for use by CRECO members and other CRECO stakeholders.
• Optimisation on information and communication technologies through continuous upgrade of technology and acquisition of better technologies for service delivery.
• Civil society sector information generation, analysis, packaging and dissemination to partners and other sectors.
• Coordinate fundraising and financial management for collective advocacy and civic education initiatives.
• Strengthen coalition building, networking and cross sector collaboration through greater membership interaction and interaction with like-minded organisations.
• Develop, enforce and foster best practices and minimum standards for adoption by members in their work.
• Conduct member profiling and institutional excellence publicity to encourage institutional reform.
• Institutionalise the use of rights based approaches in development work.
• Institutionalise gender responsive approaches in development work.
• Establish mechanisms for lesson learning and platforms for information sharing.

2. Policy and Legal Reform

CRECO recognises policy as what gives the objectives of what a society wants to achieve and views Kenya’s national policy in this light. Under this theme, CRECO will design and implement programmes aimed at strengthening the capacity of member CSOs to influence policy and decision making at all levels in favour of strengthening public service delivery. A non-responsive and restrictive policy environment has demonstrated how otherwise productive individual and corporate actors in national and regional development can be rendered ineffective and irrelevant. Such an incapacitating policy environment has often times been made worse by an equally hostile and weak legal regime.

Through this theme, CRECO’s focus will be on enhancing the intensity and impact of its various member interventions through coordinated value adding actions. For every consortium level intervention under this theme, CRECO will take due cognisance of the individual member interventions and restrict the consortium intervention to the collective value adding programmes and activities that jointly involve members, and where need arises other partners.

Recognizing the government’s lead role in policy and legal development, CRECO will promote structured engagement with government on the basis of principles defined by the membership and partners in the civil society.

Strategic Goal 2: To achieve a citizen-responsive national policy and legal regime by the year 2010.

CRECO will employ appropriate combinations of the various strategies identified below towards attaining the strategic goal:

• Conduct reviews and gap analysis in policy research and advocacy areas of relevance to members and stakeholders with a view to raising the profile and voice of civil society work in selected areas.
• Conduct reviews and gap analysis in legal research and advocacy.
• Translation of research into joint action with member CSOs and other stakeholders through continuing coalition building and strengthened networking.
• Information documentation, publications and dissemination on the state of policy and legal reform efforts.
• Knowledge management on policy and legal reform initiatives.
• Coordination of civic education, technical and financial backstopping and civic education materials production.
• Hosting regular open policy dialogue forums for joint evaluation of reform efforts and generation of priorities for joint and separate action.
• Cross sector and inter-consortia collaboration on policy and legal reforms.
• Proactive engagement of and in the GJLOS reform programme.
• Investment in members’ capacity for increased uptake of information and communication technologies

3. Democracy and Governance

Kenya is on a tortuous path of democratisation and governance reform. For this to be sustained, it will require the combined efforts of a broad array of actors. Based on its history and knowledge of democracy and governance issues, and in line with its mandate, CRECO has an important role to play in propping up these nascent democratic reforms. Seen in this light, the struggle for a new constitution is relevant to CRECO’s work due to the immense potential that it has to transform the country’s institutions and governance structures. The overriding goal will be to achieve optimum levels of direct, active and informed public participation in governance processes at all levels.

Programmes and interventions under this theme will aim at:

• Improved civil society collaboration and partnership on issues of democracy and governance
• Structured collaboration in public sector reform, policy implementation, monitoring and evaluation
• Development and promotion of participatory governance approaches
• Ensuring that government is accountable to communities for budgeting and public expenditure
• Development of transformational leadership within member CSOs

Strategic Goal 3: To attain an entrenched culture of democratic governance in Kenya through increased and informed public participation in governance processes at all levels by the year 2010.

This will be achieved through a combination of the following strategies:

• Institutionalise a culture of respect for the rule of law and constitutionalism amongst members CSOs and in Kenya through joint action with like-minded actors.
• Coordinate the development and effective implementation of mass civic education programmes on the constitution and good governance.
• Provide leadership in materials production for mass civic education.
• Conduct monitoring and reporting on public sector performance
• Support and coordinate mass civic action on critical democracy and governance issues.
• Investment in members’ capacity for increased uptake of information and communication technologies

 Cross Cutting themes

A. Gender and Diversity

CRECO has identified gender as a cross-cutting theme in all its areas of thematic focus and programmatic intervention because it embraces the importance of gender equity to holistic human development. CRECO believes in the essential dignity of all men and women, and their capacity to lead productive lives and overcome any challenges and pressures that may impinge on their ability to enjoy dignified lives. To this cause, CRECO recognises and supports the need to radically and positively transform gender relations in its leadership, the leadership of all member CSOs, its entire membership, and partner communities and institutions.

Continued comprehensive integration of gender parity into CRECO’s programmes and intervention strategies is expected to make significant contribution to tackling causes of women’s and young people’s deprivation and their non-active participation in leadership and governance processes at all levels. This approach will also continue providing useful anchorage for transforming hurdles to young people’s and women’s unhindered access to strategic resources like knowledge and credible information, education and employment opportunities, capital and credit; and promote justice to the advantage of men as well as women.

Because women and young people are in a subordinate position, special efforts and resources will be required to promote their full and active participation in CRECO-facilitated initiatives in order to make them equal partners in the fulfilment of CRECO’s mandates. Women and young people have less access to power, education and training, paid employment, essential development infrastructure and services like information. This affects every aspect of their lives, including participation in public life and decision-making, contribution to community development, vulnerability to HIV/AIDS etc. CRECO seeks to critically analyse and address these differences as part of the dialogue for its programme activities to have a lasting and positive impact. To realise this, CRECO will give women and young people in all its areas of intervention opportunities to formulate their own priorities and work with men in addressing the status quo in their contexts. CRECO will uphold the following approaches as a basis for realising gender equity in all its areas of thematic focus and strategic action:

• Developing positive action to promote the full participation and empowerment of young people and women in democracy and governance processes and initiatives so as to ensure that CRECO’s interventions benefit men, women, the young and the old equally
• Confronting the social and ideological barriers to youth and women’s participation and deliberately addressing improvement of their basic rights and status
• Promoting independent access for women and young people to key resources, services and facilities

CRECO will encourage action by the web of its membership and partners, taking cognisance of local circumstances and respecting the pace, capacity and strategies of local women and men for change.

B. Human Rights

The need to have programmes, activities and approaches that focus on promoting equality in human dignity is of incalculable value in the shaping of CRECO’s strategy and work ethic. During the period of this strategic plan, CRECO will consciously take into consideration the evolution, practice and challenges of Human Rights in Kenya and the East African Region with regards to their universality, indivisibility and inalienability, and what they mean to the communities it works in partnership with. CRECO will put in place a process of building the requisite expertise in developing rights based educational materials, programmes and approaches. 

Focus on Human Rights will provide the background and values for CRECO, its programmes, activities and approaches, while being a more explicit element of its business. CRECO takes cognisance of the recent events in Kenya, Uganda, Zanzibar, Sudan, Ethiopia, Iraq, USA among many other countries, that threaten the foundations of a culture of peace and Human Rights, and therefore seeks in this 5-year strategy to adopt a more visible, explicit and conscious approach to Human Rights in all its work.

Programme design will seek to continuously identify responses to persistent violations of human dignity, such as social exclusion, ethnic jingoism and biases, socio-political violence, gender-based forms of violence, intolerance and discrimination (especially structural discrimination of traditionally marginalised communities and groups).