Insights

In Tanzania, NPI EXPAND provided grants to three local NGOs to support twenty five village savings and loans groups (WORTH Yetu groups) to generate income by producing, promoting, and selling non-medical masks and soap. During the grant development process, NPI EXPAND and the NGOs identified three areas for capacity strengthening: business planning, social marketing, and quality assurance for mask and soap production. To meet the capacity strengthening needs, NPI EXPAND and the NGOs scanned available local resources and identified two organizations that could meet the need: T-MARC Tanzania, a local social marketing organization, and Small Industries Development Organization (SIDO), a Tanzanian parastatal organization. The project issued a sub-award to T-MARC to provide technical assistance to the NGOs and WORTH Yetu groups on business planning and social marketing of non-medical masks and soap. T-MARC worked collaboratively with the NGOs to design and implement trainings on business planning for production, marketing, and distribution of non-medical masks and soap. Once trained, the NGOs cascaded the trainings to the Worth Yetu group members. To ensure the government’s quality standards were met, the NGOs partnered with SIDO to train the WORTH Yetu groups on the production of non-medical masks and soap. This approach of engaging local resources aimed to not only strengthen the technical capacity of the NGOs and WORTH Yetu groups, it also sought to strengthen their relational capacity by enhancing productive linkages between the NGOs, WORTH Yetu Groups, and local capacity development providers.