Director's Report

Tuesday, 24 August 2010 00:00

Duncan Andrew This, our 20th anniversary year, has been strangely contradictory, and because of that, a challenging year. On the one hand, we celebrated 20 years of facilitating community based care and support to orphan's and other vulnerable children; saw our beneficiary numbers increase, achieved almost all of our service delivery targets for the year and secured funding for the expansion of some of our existing services and the introduction of new health related services.

Yet, on the other hand, we have had to implement significant cost savings (including reduced working hours for staff) to ensure that we operated within the limits of the funding available to us during 2009/10.

As a result of the global economic crisis in the second half of 2008, some of our donors indicated that they would have to reduce their funding to us in 2009 and one donor significantly cut their funding from previous levels. We also saw a strengthening of the South African Rand against most major currencies resulting in an effective exchange rate “loss” in the transfer of funds to Thandanani during the course of 2009.

The net effect is that Thandanani received a lot less funding in 2009 than we had anticipated for the year and we had to introduce significant cost cutting measures. These included cutting our activity costs by approximately 20% and reducing our staffing costs by approximately 12% through the introduction of a 4 day working week for 6 months of the year. This “loss” of funding compared to previous years is reflected in the following graph which shows our expenditure against child beneficiaries over the last six years.

Looking ahead, while we anticipate a better year in 2010/11, we still expect that funding will not reach ideal levels and so we have been proactive to ensure that we are able to continue effective service delivery on the basis of the funding available to us. As a result, we have decided to withdraw from 3 of the smaller communities we currently work in and from the Early Learning Centre's we currently support in order to reduce our overall costs and ensure effective delivery to our remaining beneficiaries within the funding available to us for the coming year.

The decision to withdraw from these communities and ELC's was not taken lightly and we have worked hard to ensure that the transition was as smooth as possible for them. Fortunately, several of the ELC's we have been supporting are close to receiving, or are already receiving, a subsidy from the State. This means that they will be able to continue to function independently of our support in the year ahead. Similarly, almost all of the households' in the communities we are withdrawing from are now in receipt of state grants. This means that, while they will not be able to benefit from some of our other services in the future, they do have improved capacity to meet the basic needs of
the children in these households.

Yet, despite these challenges, Thandanani remains well positioned for the future. We have a comprehensive program of activities based on a well established and holistic model of OVC care and support that is appropriate to the needs of the families and communities we serve; a committed staff and volunteer cadre who continue to maintain high standards in service delivery; and a diligent and proactive Board who maintain careful oversight of the organisation. With this in place we are hopeful that we will be able to retain the support of our current donors and be successful in attracting new donors in what is likely to continue to be a highly competitive funding environment for some time.

That this is possible is evidenced by the fact that Thandanani has secured funding for the introduction of a range of new health services in 2010/11 that will see us employ new health staff and begin the roll out of HIV Education & Awareness; Voluntary Counselling and Testing; and Treatment Compliance Monitoring services to households on our database.

The exciting thing about the introduction of these services is that they are planned to take place primarily at the household level and we are hoping that this, together with the fact that we already have supportive relationships with the households we work with, will result in greater uptake and adherence on the part of the children and caregivers we serve. One of the other important factors in the roll out of these services is that they are aligned to the National Strategy on HIV and will compliment and strengthen the Department of Health's fight against the pandemic within the communities in which we work.

With the introduction of these new services we will be offering the families we support a truly comprehensive and holistic range of services that will assist them to move from a state of vulnerability to increased self-reliance within a three to four year period. Once this happens households will exit our system and function independently of our support.

This movement of households through our system will ensure that families do not become dependent on Thandanani and that Thandanani itself is able to take on new households without creating an unsustainable demand on our capacity and resources. In the current economic climate, hese changes become even more important and will help ensure that we remain a strong, wellmanaged organisation that utilises it available resources well and continues to positively impact on the lives of the children we serve.

Another positive and related development during the current year has been the refinement of our database. Thandanani currently has a comprehensive biographical database of the households we support and we have been working at extending this database to capture the services delivered to each household or individual in that household (which we currently do using pen & paper records). This will enable us to generate reports indicating the full extent of service delivery to specific households or individuals and also allow us to track the movement of these households through the various stages of our household support & development model over time. It is this movement of households from a state of vulnerability to increased stability and self reliance over time which will then be used as an indicator of the overall impact of our interventions. This extension of our database has largely been completed and we anticipate being able to produce our first fully automated statistics and reports during the course of the coming year.

With these refinements to our database and the introduction of improved health services in 2010, we believe Thandanani will be well positioned to continue to secure support for its work. Not only will we be offering a truly comprehensive and holistic programme of care and support to OVC's and their family members but we will also be able to more clearly demonstrate our impact.

Finally, as Director, it would be wrong for me to end this section of the report without acknowledging the incredible contribution of our Board Members, staff and volunteers during the past year. As you will see in the rest of this report Thandanani has managed to maintain extremely high levels of service delivery and has effected good governance in, what has been, a strangely contradictory and challenging year. It is this dedication, commitment and sacrifice that has seen us through the year and stands us in good stead for the future.

As a tribute to our board members, staff and volunteers, I would like to highlight the fact that during a recent evaluation of our services, beneficiaries largely gave our services a huge thumbs up and openly expressed their appreciation for the work that we do. So to all the members of the Thandanani team, I would like to extend my sincere thanks and appreciation for all your hard work, commitment and sacrifice.

Sincerely,

Duncan Andrew - Director

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