So on Wednesday I submitted the memorandum of understanding for my first project.
I didn’t do a lot of work on this one, but I took it over because it was convenient and I’m waiting on a reply from our people in Ethiopia before I can go on with the stoves and wash-station one.
Basically, we wanted to build a farm at the Saria Kebele Primary School in Amhara, Ethiopia. This is all well and good – but how is it going to work? Our contact in Ethiopia had put together a budget and a proposal for us, and I had to go through it and put it into a Memorandum of Understanding (basically, the sort of contract that NGOs use).
The scale of the problem is really quite startling: the farm is not just to make money, it’s to make sure that the kids have enough food to eat! Hopefully, we’ll be able to teach them some good farming practices as well, given that poor management is such an issue in Ethiopia. Other than that, I’ve been reading the latest UN report on the Millennium Development Goals in order to target our governmental requests for funding as accurately as possible. You can read it here: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/report-2013/mdg-report-2013-english.pdf Apparently, after 43 years, the UK is going to meet its target of spending 0.7% of GNI on foreign aid. This should be great for us – hopefully it’ll become easier to get DFID funding for our projects!