Although ANSA-EAP is not mainly a funding mechanism, it uses grants support to help SAc projects gain strategic importance, add value to SAc initiatives, and enhance networking efforts.

ANSA-EAP’s portfolio of supported initiatives reflects its priorities in the region. Its preference is to provide seed funding to small-scale but strategic SAc initiatives that—

  • promote constructive engagement between key stakeholders of governance;
  • push for the monitoring of government processes, services, and performance; and/or,
  • are in line with ANSA-EAP’s priority themes and targeted development outcomes.

How ANSA-EAP Focuses Its Assistance

Projects assisted by ANSA-EAP complement SA‐related programs in the region or in the priority countries (Indonesia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and the Philippines).

These projects also address ANSA-EAP’s thematic areas (procurement monitoring, service delivery, extractive industry, youth) and are under the umbrella of ANSA‐EAP’s operational components: networking, learning-in-action, knowledge, and resource mobilization/utilization.

Local partners carry out all supported projects. ANSA-EAP looks for projects that are measurable, streamlined and potentially sustainable. They should contain clear linkages with specific government institutions to ensure grounding, buy‐in, and ownership.

Small-grants support is open to any civil society organizations based in East Asia-Pacific and involved in development issues.

CSOs should be in good standing and must have a record of achievement in the community and a record of financial probity. 

ANSA-EAP gives priority to organizations that have previous or ongoing work related to social accountability, transparency, and governance.

Assisted Projects

The ceiling for small-grants is US$ 25,000.  As a general rule, ANSA‐EAP encourages local partners to contribute counterpart resources for their proposed projects and to pro‐actively approach other funding partners for additional support.

Since 2008, ANSA-EAP has provided small-grants assistance to about 33 SAc projects in Cambodia (10 projects), Indonesia (5), Mongolia (3), the Philippines (11 projects), and the region (4).

In February 2010, ANSA-EAP convened a grantees’ workshop in Manila to evaluate the relative effectiveness of its small-grants. Thirteen grantees attended the workshop from all priority countries.

The aims of the workshop were to help grantees—

  • situate their respective projects within this Framework; 
  • share their insights and experience in identifying indicators that would best describe or demonstrate in measurable terms the achievement of ANSA-EAP’s goal and objectives; and,
  • make a self-assessment of what improvements in project implementation should be pursued to strengthen the link of their projects with ANSA-EAP’s results frame. 

Among others, the workshop confirmed multiple links by the projects to ANSA-EAP strategic objectives: 12 projects related to information awareness, 11 to networking, 9 to capacity building and 4 to both resource mobilization and research and knowledge management.

Read more about our Strategic Initiatives in Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines and EAP (Regional).

Download full ANSA-EAP Strategic Initiatives Portfolio.

Photo courtesy of J. Ibarra Angeles (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License)