Annual Plan Narrative 2024-2025

Table of Contents

Institutional commitments

Our external commitments to those most affected must also be reflected in CIVICUS’s internal systems and processes. Therefore, CIVICUS will continue the following institutional strengthening and accountability practices to enable the successful delivery of our strategy:

Resilient Systems

We will actively manage and further integrate risk management, continue automation of processes, and enhance data and digital security protocols and processes to strengthen our programme quality, innovation and learning. CIVICUS will enable our teams to collaborate and use innovative approaches to unified planning, execution and impact across the organisation. We will deepen our understanding of how our partners experience our systems and how we improve their experience with systems like partnership management and sub granting.

Learning and growing impact

We will conduct a mid-term strategic review to understand our progress against our objectives and mid-term outcomes. We will improve the integration of feedback from external stakeholders, especially our strategic target groups, into our monitoring, evaluation and learning processes. A new verified outcome inventory of change stories will be launched on the CIVICUS website.

Resilient Finances, Resourcing and Sustainability

We continue to see steady progress on the diversification, growth and optimization of resources. Investment in a dedicated resource mobilisation and partnerships team has helped us progress driving a systematic donor outreach plan. The team has developed and adopted a costed strategy focusing our fundraising efforts to achieve the ambitions outlined in the CIVICUS strategy. Accordingly, this year we continue to implement and monitor the resourcing and sustainability strategy and costed resourcing plan. We continue targeted donor outreach and activities to grow and diversify our supporter base, focusing on securing core-flexible funds. We also aim to strengthen strategic collaboration through our donor coordination group, utilising opportunities to engage in donor influencing, and an example is the Donor Transformation Challenge.

Resilient People and Accountability Practices

We continue to deliver the learning and development framework, which incorporates concepts and leadership practices to foster shared identity and promote a culture that builds collaboration and cohesion across teams. The work rolling out CIVICUS Unified Code of Ethics continues. This includes an updated suite of Code of Conduct policies to ensure greater understanding of the commitments in the Secretariat and wider alliance. We will assess and improve organisational health, including governance and leadership effectiveness.

Monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning (MEAL)

In alignment with our Integrated Results Framework, we measure our progress using both qualitative and quantitative metrics. We recognize that our MEAL requirements may need to be adjusted as we take on new initiatives and partnerships to realise our long-term outcomes. 

In this annual plan narrative, the relevance and quality of our work is reflected through learning questions per strategic objective. The proxy indicators include annual targets.  

The mid-term strategy review exercise is an opportunity to assess our progress towards our long-term outcomes. We will assess the effectiveness, relevance and quality of our work by engaging networks and movements of young people, women, workers, LGBTQI+ people, Indigenous, environmental groups and/or broader social justice movements to assist us in answering our learning question: 

In what ways is our work supporting those groups affected by the combined impact of civic space restrictions and structural forms of discrimination? 

CIVICUS seeks to improve our MEAL practice and strengthen our self-reporting through validation with external data sources, partner and/or communities. Through this strategic period, we will work to  expand the stakeholders engaged in the assessment of our work. Qualitative reporting at the programmatic level supports the alliance to have a coherent and nuanced understanding of how our collective work influences change. We will capture this information on our MEAL system and share our progress and learnings through our annual reporting process. In the new annual plan year, we will publish a new outcome inventory web page to share three validated stories of CIVICUS’s unique contribution to eco-system strengthening for civil society action and democratic freedoms.