Benin, May 7, 2019
The African CSO Excellence Awards highlight the importance of organizational capacity to achieve program impact and showcase African civil society organizations who demonstrate organizational excellence despite daunting challenges. It is a joint initiative between EPIC-Africa and the Rockefeller Foundation.
This first edition of the award was launched in October 2018 and included a rigorous 2 stage questionnaire, in-depth document review, video interviews, reference checks, and a final jury evaluation to determine the winners. ACED participated in the competition with 949 other civil society organizations from 46 African countries.
The evaluation panel is a collection of practitioners and thinkers in African philanthropy. They are people committed to strengthening African civil society organizations and using technology to bring innovation and dynamism to a sector that is so essential to Africa’s advancement. They include donors, program officers, technology specialists, and organizational effectiveness researchers.
The evaluators awarded Excellence prizes in each of the eight main indicators of organizational capacity: Strategic Ability and Adaptability, Leadership and Governance, Financial Health and Management, Human Resources and Staff Development, Operations, Communications, Partnerships and Alliances, and Monitoring and Evaluation.
ACED is the winner of this year’s award in the category Partnership and Alliances.
“We are thankful to EPIC-Africa and the Rockefeller Foundation for acknowledging our investment in partnerships and alliances over the years. We believe that development actions should be implemented in collaboration with relevant stakeholders. This award is a confirmation that our partnership and alliances strategy is a good way to successfully alleviate poverty and improve food security with grass-root communities” says Frejus Thoto, ACED Co-founder and Executive Director.
For the evaluators, “winners of the first edition of the African CSO Excellence Awards stood out because of their openness to being assessed and their commitment to learning and growth. They are not only modeling best practices in terms of organizational effectiveness, but also crucially, helping to start an important conversation in Africa about CSO transparency and accountability.”
The winners across each category and the overall winner will get an opportunity to fundraise on the international GlobalGiving Platform, increase their media visibility and participate in networking opportunities through the African CSO Excellence Awards community.
Media Contact
Priscille Goussanou
Communication officer, ACED
About ACED
ACED is a policy research organization that builds connections between action research and policies in the food security and environment sectors ultimately to improve the livelihoods of vulnerable populations in Benin. Over the last 10 years, ACED has been working to mobilize stakeholders around critical issues that affect smallholder farmers by conducting research and translating the results into action and policy. For more information, visit https://aced.ddev.site/
About EPIC-Africa
EPIC-Africa seeks to enhance philanthropic impact by filling critical data and capacity gaps in the philanthropic market infrastructure in Africa. We envisage a vibrant philanthropic ecosystem with diverse, influential, sustainable African civil society groups at the center. EPIC-Africa contributes to this transformative vision by enabling: Greater visibility, increased resources, widespread communication, more diversified and steady funding, transparency, accountability, and a resilient ecosystem. For more information, visit http://www.epic-africa.org/
About The Rockefeller Foundation
For more than 100 years, The Rockefeller Foundation’s mission has been to promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world. Today the Foundation is focused on securing the fundamentals of human well-being—health, food, power, and jobs—to ensure every family experiences dignity and opportunity in our rapidly urbanizing world. Together with partners and grantees, The Rockefeller Foundation strives to catalyze and scale transformative innovations, create unlikely partnerships that span sectors, and take risks others cannot – or will not. For more information, visit www.rockefellerfoundation.org
