Publications
Summary of publication
This document is a review of the Cambodia Community Development Fund.
The objective of the Community Development Fund (CDF) Review mission was to consider and make recommendations on how the CDF can increase the effectiveness of its community development focus to strengthen the broader bilateral program with particular reference to the new Country Program Strategy and Performance Assessment Framework.
The review considered the CDF from the perspective of both AusAID Cambodia as the donor responsible for the management of a relatively small discretionary fund and how it can more effectively and strategically contribute to the achievement of the AusAID Cambodia Country Program Strategy.
It also considered the fund from the perspective of the organisations who receive funding from the fund. This included a mix of international and local non-government organisations that use CDF funding to complement and enhance larger projects, to fund small pilot initiatives and as a critical source of funding for core activities.
- Recommendations 1 and 2 (p7-9) address the larger strategic and sectoral framework that informs the fund, using the draft AusAID Country Program Strategy as the main guide.
- Recommendation 3 and 4 (p10-11) address the management of the fund – mechanisms to ensure the accountability and transparency of the NGOs receiving funding, as well as how the fund can be used to strengthen and support Cambodian civil society as part of AusAID's broader good governance objectives.
- Recommendation 5 (p12) addresses specific guidance for projects involved in water and sanitation projects, with a focus on enhancing community engagement and education as the basis for improving the effectiveness of such projects, and requirements to collaborate, coordinate or complement government initiatives in this area.
- Recommendation 6 (p15) focuses on the monitoring and evaluation requirements for the CDF from the perspective of AusAID's need to enhance the performance assessment of their programs. It recommends an approach to monitoring the CDF in order to collect information about its contribution to the AusAID Country Program Strategy that recognises the limitations of imposing new and complex processes or mechanisms onto NGOs and the capacity of AusAID to collect and analyse large quantities of information about small scale activities.