IAMDES: New Vision of Partnership

From the Blue Community IAMDES Togo: 

IAMDES-Togo advocates a new vision of partnership for development.

The financing of development projects and the survival of local NGOs after the execution of said projects pose problems for leaders of the associative world. The managers of IAMDES -Togo, witness the disruption of the life cycle of actions in the environment and the decline of local NGOs in Africa, themselves, after external funding. For more than thirty (30) years, it has been impossible for local NGOs and their actions to achieve true autonomy without acquiring technical, cultural, decision-making and financial powers at the end of projects or programs.

Consultation of IAMDES-Togo actors

After years of dependence on external funding, local NGOs are currently facing major challenges. In terms of capacity building, they must, for each new project, recruit and train staff in international solidarity project management because they have difficulty maintaining skills adapted to international standards. On issues of resource mobilization, they must invest in the drafting of new projects or programs if possible for the continuity of actions.

To free itself from the vicious circle, IAMDES-Togo has adopted a vision of partnership focused on the sustainability of the actions of local structures. For its founding members: “By 2026 to 2035, make the actions of IAMDES-Togo and those of its communities structurally sustainable, financially autonomous and locally governed, so that the majority of local initiatives can be continued, adapted and extended after the withdrawal of external funding, while constituting a reproducible model for other local NGOs in the territories,” specifies an extract from the vision document of the said NGO.

Thus, for their financial autonomy, local NGOs must find solutions to free themselves from external financial dependence and invent financing mechanisms for substantial production of their own funds for the sustainability of actions. External financing should only be complementary support.

It is for this reason that the NGO IAMDES-Togo focuses its mission on a clear principle of partnership which precedes the financing for the implementation of all the prerequisites necessary for the sustainability of the projects: “sustainably strengthen the capacities of IAMDES-Togo and those of the communities of its territories of intervention to mobilize unrestricted financing with complete confidence, after co-construction of the projects from its basic program, to implement and sustain their actions, through training, local action research and the development of economic activities that strongly generate equity capital, in order to ensure the continuity of impacts beyond the projects financed.»

Ultimately, the organization wants to ensure the sustainability of its actions and those of its local communities, by building an integrated model where project assets, local skills and innovative mechanisms contribute to the production of own funds and the total autonomy of actions on the ground.

@IAMDES News HB/05/08/2026