FIRDOS - The Fund for Integrated Rural Development Of Syria

FIRDOS
The Fund for Integrated Rural Development Of Syria

The Fund for Integrated Rural Development Of Syria (FIRDOS) was established in 2001 .It  operates under the umbrella of the Syria Trust for Development since 2007.

Dedicated to improving living conditions in rural Syria by empowering individuals and communities to adress their needs,FIRDOS  provides a wide range of social services, helps creating new employment opportunities, and contributes to skill development.

To date, FIRDOS has reached 60,000 individuals in more than 60 villages organised in 7 village clusters in the Governorates of Lattakia, Idleb, Aleppo , Rural Damascus Hamah, Homs, and Qunietra. FIRDOS has achieved core competencies through all its initiatives, with regard to the establishment and empowerment of community based organisations (CBOs), liaison and advocacy, in addition to providing these CBOs with th necessary skills to help them  identify  and address their real needs, advocate them to public and other organisations.

In the next phase, FIRDOS will work on enhancing the bottom-up approach that aims to strengthen and enable the local community to become capable of taking the lead in the development process. Hence, FIRDOS will  greatly focus on contributing to the establishment of CBOs, train them  to prepare a rapid self assessment and propose actions,  so they can be either linked to possible resources or enabled to implement on their own.

Furthermore, FIRDOS seeks to expand its outreach and impact in rural Syria in the upcoming years through capitalising on existing and new partnerships with various stakeholders, including rural communities, development actors, government establishments, civil society organisations, media, donors,etc.

FIRDOS programmes are funded by a a range of international and national donors, including international organizations, national government and private sector entities and Syrian individuals. Though FIRDOS has long-term objectives, its programmes and activities vary in duration based on the scope of intervention and set objectives.

 FIRDOS Vision

Syrian rural communities that are empowered to improve their living conditions achieve self-reliance and create equal opportunities for their members.

 FIRDOS Mission

FIRDOS empowers rural communities to establish community-based organisations that create equal opportunities and improve service delivery through advocacy, self-reliance and partnership with the development community

FIRDOS Objectives

1- Improved income and level of services, decreased gender inequality in targeted rural areas;

2- Development agents prioritise rural development on the national development agenda and are aware of FIRDOS methodologies;

3- Civil society is engaged in rural development of Syria and designs, manages & implements development initiatives;

4- The Trust is able to draw on FIRDOS capacity to boost its overall reputation and sustainability.

Strategy Outlines

As part of the overall Trust strategy, FIRDOS will play a key role in the strategic shift that will be undertaken as of FY 2011/2012. FIRDOS will primarily seek broadening its role as a catalyst for rural development by working with rural communities on the ground to strengthen their ownership of the development process, implementation and management of individual and collective projects that would benefit their communities and increase their access to services and funds. By joining hands with a multitude of other stakeholders and partners, FIRDOS will expand its outreach to rural communities across the country.

In light of its clearly identified strategy and the experience accumulated throughout the years, FIRDOS will employ its expertise and resources to meet the transformation requirements, assuring compliance with its four development objectives and the outputs agreed upon in order to reach the ultimate impact foreseen. To date, it is estimated that FIRDOS has succeeded in reaching roughly 0.7% of the rural Syrian community and is aiming through its new approach and working processes to reach 5% of the rural Syrian population, within the next five years.

A key prerequisite for the successful shift within FIRDOS’ strategy is the creation of a community empowerment model to be piloted and tested. Successful models would be packaged, replicated and disseminated for use by other rural communities as well as the development sector at large. In doing so, FIRDOS will steer its focus to the field, the one major arena for the interpretation of its strategic transformation, by shifting the centre of the development process to the end users themselves. 

Within the coming five years FIRDOS will work to design, test and implement an easily replicable module of empowerment, that allows villages and village clusters to develop self‐help organisations, define and advocate for their needs, and act on their needs through a combination of self‐help and government assistance. A key element to this strategy is for FIRDOS to contribute to the establishment of community based organisations or action committees, trained to prepare a rapid self assessment and propose actions, which are then linked to possible resources or enabled to implement on their own. FIRDOS will have available a small fund to support Micro‐Projects that support local initiatives on a competitive basis.

Similar models are already widely used in the region and could in the long‐term become a basis for a national program with a Government partner organisation. The model follows international best practice. Syria has a wide range of public sector and NGO programs that aim at providing rural services, but lacks the empowerment mechanisms through which to express community need, ownership and participation. While governance structures are in place in the form of local councils at the nahia level, these structures often lack the finer granular structure required to become active at the village level.

It is hoped that the program in the longer term will impact legal structures that give recognition to community based organisations or action committees, thus complementing already existing governance structures at higher levels of government. This requires FIRDOS and TRUST advocacy at the national level, based on positive outcomes of proposed strategy. An immediate impact is the use of CBOs by others in the Development Community.

FIRDOS outputs will be delivered through the following delivery mechanisms:

- CBO Representation: Outputs include identifying villages, village clusters, and or interest groups in need of CBO representation.

- Training and Need Identification: This involves training, which is structured as learning by doing, with training resulting in the identification of feasible projects for self-help or supplementary funding from the development community including government. It also involves training in securing organisational sustainability through appropriate forms of structures, mechanisms for representation, and resource mobilisation.

- Micro-Project Fund: This represents a small fund, which FIRDOS uses to assist with micro-projects identified by local CBOs, both to train in project design, delivery and implementation, and to establish trust and confidence building. The establishment of such funds and disbursements on a competitive basis is common throughout the region but is still not in wide use in Syria. It is hoped that the experience with this fund in the longer term can be up scaled to a national level with policy implications.

- Unwinding Legacy Programs: This includes the design and assessment of cluster spin off and hand-over strategies. Once implemented, existing FIRDOS clusters and assistance programmes will be handed over/spun off.

- Program Up-Scale: In order to scale up, FIRDOS must first prepare an expansion strategy based on its lessons learned, design appropriate procedures and guidelines for expansion, and prepare a partnership strategy and train rotating empowerment teams that are deployed to instigate the development and empowerment process in new clusters.

- Advocacy, Liaison and Backstopping: This includes linking CBOs to potential partners, assisting CBOs in advocating their needs and identifying resources, and being available in a role to backstop and assist where needed

- Monitoring and Evaluation: Given the limited replicability of past FIRDOS products, outputs here include a much improved framework for design, testing, and impact evaluation. Only when FIRDOS can guarantee a much accelerated and streamlined delivery, it will be able to become a strong advocate for policy making at the national level.

- Policy Framework: This evolves FIRDOS advocacy for legal and regulatory structures that recognise the role of community based organisations and give it a role in service delivery.

- Contribution to Trust Reputation and Sustainability: This involves contribution to innovation and knowledge base through knowledge and experience sharing and established synergies, contribution to management systems through fundraising and the establishment of cost-sharing and benchmarking systems and contribution to reputation, image and branding, through a comprehensive communication strategy.

During the fiscal year 2011/2012 FIRDOS field Programmes will be working in context of the FIRDOS mentioned above objectives, ensuring consistency with pre-designed results chain.  Programmes will focus on the mentioned five major themes of work for this fiscal year for the effective and efficient introduction of the new strategy to partners, stakeholders, and end users.

FIRDOS Programmes

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