By Tokpa Tarnue tarnue82@gmail.com
A Pre-Submission and Orientation meeting with civil society organizations has ended in Voinjama, the provincial capital of Liberia’s northwestern County of Lofa.
The meeting was conducted by the Liberia Accountability and Voice Initiative (LZVI) Grants Program.
Giving an overview of the Liberia Accountability and Voice Initiative (LAVI) Grants Program at the meeting in Voinjama, LAVI Chief of Party for Liberia Milica Panic disclosed that the program is a five-year, USAID-funded project that focuses on Teaching Quality and improve Classroom Learning Relevance.
The project she said will also work in Strengthening Sector Communication and Stakeholder Engagement, Implementation of Accountability Measures and Advocating for Increased Resources for Education Sector Priorities or Existing Gap.
She said in January 2017, LAVI worked with GeoPoll/Mobile Accord to conduct a national survey to obtain citizens’ perception of the major issues that are trending in Liberia.
“According to that survey, Education emerged as one of the three priority areas for possible LAVI’s intervention along with security and budget transparency”.
The LAVI official said as a follow-up to this survey, LAVI supported the National Civil Society Council of Liberia to conduct five complementary regional consultative dialogues that were held in Bomi, Maryland, Grand Gedeh, Bong, and Grand Bassa Counties.
“These dialogues she said brought together 176 participants to discuss and prioritize GeoPoll/Mobile Accord’s survey results,” the group’s official added.
Participating Civil Society Organizations at the Thematic Window Programming Grants meeting are to submit their concept notes between now to March 1, 2028.
According to her, successful SCOs she said will move to the next level which will include the development of proposals for the implementation of the project.
LAVI says it will ensure that civil society organizations based in Lofa are the implementers on the project and not Monrovia based NGOs.