VISION
We aspire to develop a globally applicable and locally available framework for community driven improvements at the grassroots.
MISSION
To offer capacity building, collaborative forums and the funding support that local leaders need to improve governance systems and the education, health and economy of their communities.
BACKGROUND
Support for community development usually takes the following forms:
1. Individual Donations
2. Capacity building
3. Collaborative Forums
4. Corporate Sponsorship
5. Research products
Generally, there is minimal evidence base for development work in many parts of Africa. Anecdotes suggest that while there are various government efforts and activities by development organizations, the need remains great.
In our experience of supporting partners in Nigeria, only 10 out of the 10 partners we have worked with since 2010 have been beneficiaries of funding from philanthropic minded individuals but only 3 have received capacity building in the sphere of their activities.
Of these, only one has been able to identify a collaborative forum in their local area that utilizes research products, and went ahead to obtain corporate sponsorship to enable a more strategic approach to their activities.
With the five types of support aligned, that one partner has been able to scale their social enterprise and is now a key influencer in their sector.
So what we have observed as the biggest impediment to sustainability and maximizing of impact is the absence of evidence based decision making. The result of this serious knowledge gap in areas such as health care provision, education, governance and enterprise also leads to poor planning by decision makers and poorer program outcomes, inconsistency, inefficiency and in some cases, abandoned projects.
There is minimal collaboration and very little documentation if any by local development partners leading to lack of trust by corporate donors to make substantial investments that could bring about significant improvement at the community level.
The Spring Development Initiative comes into this gap with our programs which target the more elusive components of development support. We will partner with local influencers to collaborate and access available resources for implementing their programs. We will also work with research enterprises to help develop, and make publicly available, evidence especially in our focus areas and pioneer innovative analysis of available data to help bridge the gap.