Partnership in Japan's Grant Assistance for Grassroots Projects: Lessons from Zimbabwe

Abstract

The Japan's Grant Assistance for Grassroots Project scheme aims at helping relatively small community-oriented activities implemented by local public bodies, research/medical organizations and NGOs. Under the scheme, the Embassy is empowered to play active roles in identifying, evaluating and funding the projects, as it believed to have in-depth knowledge of their respective host countries. However, compared with other donors with longer experience in comparable scheme, the Japanese Embassy tends to have limited capacity and expertise in such projects. They are also weak in making a connection with local network to gather information at the grassroots level. At the same time, recipients in general also lack capacity and expertise to formulate projects for the Japanese Embassy. In this situation, partnership between key actors can contribute to supplementing weakness of each actor and consolidate efforts and resources towards the shared project objective. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate critical conditions for such partnership among actors to function in the contest of grassroots projects by the Embassy. The author compares the functioning of partnership in two small-grant projects funded by the Embassy of Japan in Zimbabwe to draw lessons.

Compared with traditional government-to-government aid projects, small community-based projects heavily rely on local actors with limited capacity. Examples in Zimbabwe indicate successful projects need effective partnership between the Embassy, recipients and “intermediary”, which in particular plays a valuable role of coordination such that it bridges gaps in knowledge, experience and resources between actors, and mediates interest among them. The author emphasizes importance of such function by the intermediary for functioning partnership for small community-oriented grant projects. At the end, the author makes a recommendation for the Embassy with a view to improving its performance in the Grant Assistance for Grassroots Projects.