During September, MyRight arranged a digital conference for our regional offices. MyRight's staff at the head office in Sweden and MyRight's regional coordinator participated in the conference. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the business's ongoing projects, challenges and potential areas for improvement.
The regional coordinators opened the conference with presentations for each region (Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America) and on the status of the ongoing projects and how they were affected by the Corona pandemic. The different regions have been affected by pandemic restrictions to varying degrees. The regional coordinators mentioned that different restrictions in each country have meant that some activities have been moved from 2020 to 2021.
The budget for 2020 was discussed and how it has been affected by the pandemic and what the forecast for 2021 and 2022 looks like. The head office and the regional coordinators discussed the need to clarify different roles, areas of responsibility and mandate within MyRight. The head office and the regional coordinators discussed the importance of having similar financial reporting in all regions.
MyRight has since 2019 developed its fundraising business and has sent in applications to donors other than Forum Civ, which has been exciting and educational. The head office and the regional coordinators discussed what lessons they learn from the various applications and that it is important that MyRight has a transparent and inclusive application process where the head office, country offices, member organizations and partner organizations are kept informed and involved in the application process.
During the conference, lessons learned from the capacity-building work and how this work can be developed in the future were also discussed. MyRight will continue to work with a number of areas for capacity building at the partner organizations. These areas are leadership and management, gender sensitivity, administrative capacity, operational capacity, democratic capacity and financial capacity. MyRight's regional coordinator believes that it is important to continue working with capacity building in all these areas as all partner organizations have different needs. Another topic discussed during the conference was how MyRight can become better at supporting member organizations and partner organizations if any party wants to leave the collaboration. MyRight's head office will develop strategies and guidelines for the phase-out process and hopes that this will facilitate in the future.
MyRight's headquarters also discussed the topic of core support for partner organizations via Forum Civ. MyRight's regional coordinator for Latin America presented how the work has gone with MyRight's pilot program to apply for core support to the partner organization FECONORI in Nicaragua. MyRight will, in consultation with the member organizations, identify additional partner organizations that can be evaluated to apply for core support from Forum Civ in 2021/2022.
The conference ended with discussions about the application process for Forum Civ 2023-2027 and about the process for the annual reporting in 2020.
