Partnership Building

NFA was formed as a partnership based organization to have a targeted approach to addressing statelessness and to strengthen organizations that are led by persons with lived and learned experiences of statelessness. NFA identified four partners after a rigorous mapping of all the stakeholders working on statelessness in the region and after meeting with more than 30 organizations. Partners were chosen based on their alignment of values with NFA and the need experienced by our partners for NFA to fulfill. Three of the four organizations are led by affected persons and one of them is led by a person with learned experience of statelessness, who work closely with affected persons.

NFA: Empowering Partners with Strategic Support

NFA is focusing on garnering multi-year unrestricted support for the partner organisations and is thus facilitating the process of preparing organisational strategic plans

NFA’s partnership support includes the following kinds of services:

Institution Incubation

NFA incubated CAPN for a period of one year to help the organization grow and scale themselves. The incubation entailed the following support:

The institution incubation entails the following services for the incubated organisations:

01 Project Implementation

NFA provided the necessary support and guidance to the staff members of the incubated organization to implement their ongoing projects. For the period of the incubation NFA took necessary decisive actions with the informed consent of the organization regarding the implementation of the projects. We supported them to produce a podcast on statelessness. This also included training the staff members on project management and on using different tools of project management.

02 Operational Support

NFA provided operational support to the incubated organizations depending on their need and capacity to undertake the responsibilities themselves. This support included overseeing the daily operations of the organization; preparing organizational policies; ensuring the legal and financial compliance of the organization; undertaking or supporting the financial planning, and training the staff members on organizational operations.

03 Mentorship and Guidance

To ensure that the incubated organization did not become dependent on NFA, NFA listed out certain activities that did not require NFA’s active participation. NFA only provided mentorship and guidance to the staff members of the organization to implement such activities. NFA helped CAPN plan the podcast and also helped them record the first two episodes of the podcast. For the rest eight episodes, NFA only provided necessary guidance and refrained from interfering with the recording and editing process.

04 Planning and Fundraising

NFA organized workshops and meetings with the organization to understand the needs and interests of the organization members and helped them prepare their long-term strategic plan and advocacy roadmaps. In addition to this, NFA also helped them prepare concept notes and proposals to apply for funding.

Strategic Planning

NFA has been supporting our four partners (Link to the Partners page) on their strategic planning process. We organized a virtual workshop with all of them and then prepared the first draft of the strategic plan. After multiple reviews, we organized an in-person workshop in Nepal to strengthen the strategic plan and understand organizational priorities better. We plan to finalize all the strategic plans by February 2024.

Research

NFA has been supporting two of our partners to conduct studies on issues they work on. The first study is on the ‘Legal validity of the NRC process in India’ and the second one is on ‘Access to rights of Urdu speaking community in Bangladesh’. The goal of these studies is to support our partners in building knowledge that would support their advocacy.

Webinars and Workshops

NFA organized a webinar with FF on Digital advocacy and prepared a toolkit on social media advocacy. Similarly, NFA has organized workshops on fundraising and organization building for CAPN.

Advocacy Support

NFA worked with DAJI, CoM and FF to prepare the joint NGO Submissions on Statelessness to the Human Rights Council during the UPR process of India, Bangladesh and Malaysia, respectively. Similarly, we have been providing key advice to our partners to enforce the UPR recommendations.