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Building Stronger Civil Society for Children and Adolescents
In partnership with UNICEF Tanzania, FCS is strengthening the capacity of 30 youth-led and women/girl-led civil society organizations across Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, and Songwe, equipping them to lead sustainable, community-driven interventions that benefit children and adolescents.
Overview
Tanzania's civil society sector holds extraordinary potential to drive locally led development but too many youth-led and women-led organizations are held back by gaps in institutional knowledge, limited access to funding, and insufficient systems to manage, deliver, and account for their work.
Foundation for Civil Society, in partnership with UNICEF Tanzania, is addressing this directly. Through the programme Capacity Development of Youth-Led and Women/Girl-Led Civil Society Organizations to Benefit Children and Adolescents, FCS is working with 30 frontline organizations across three regions to strengthen both their institutional foundations and their programmatic effectiveness so they can do more for the children and communities they serve, sustain that work over time, and grow their influence as local development leaders.
The programme takes a phased, hands-on approach. It begins with an organizational capacity assessment to understand where each CSO is starting from. This is followed by a five-day physical training workshop in each region, bringing all three representatives from every organization into intensive learning on the skills and systems they need most. Ongoing mentorship and coaching then supports each organization to apply what they have learned in their own context with the most capable organizations going on to access seed funding to design and implement community and school-based interventions for children and adolescents.
This is not a one-off training. It is a pathway from organizational gap to institutional confidence, from capacity to action.
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Objectives & Key Focus Areas
The programme sets out to achieve the following:
To strengthen the institutional capacity of 30 youth-led and women/girl-led CSOs across Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, and Songwe so they can design, implement, manage, and account for development programmes that benefit children and adolescents.
To equip CSO leaders and staff with practical, applicable skills across the full spectrum of organizational management from project design and financial accountability to resource mobilization, governance, advocacy, and safeguarding.
To build a culture of local resource mobilization within participating organizations, reducing their dependence on international donor funding and strengthening their ability to draw on community, private sector, and domestic philanthropy sources.
To create a sustained support system through individual mentorship and coaching that goes beyond the training room, ensuring that learning is embedded in organizational practice rather than confined to a workshop.
To support high-performing organizations with seed funding to develop and implement community-based and school-based interventions that directly benefit children and adolescents in their areas.
To contribute to Tanzania's localization agenda by building a generation of local civil society organizations that are credible, capable, and ready to lead.
KEY FOCUS AREAS
The programme's capacity strengthening curriculum covers seven integrated thematic areas, each selected because it addresses a documented gap in the participating organizations' current capacity:
Project Management — How to design, plan, implement, and monitor a project from start to finish. Participants learn to build workplans, manage risks, track progress, and report on delivery in ways that meet donor and community expectations.
Financial Management — The systems and practices that keep an organization financially sound: budgeting, expenditure tracking, internal controls, statutory compliance, and producing financial reports that donors and boards can trust.
Leadership and Governance — What strong organizational leadership looks like and how to build it. Covering board roles and responsibilities, decision-making structures, institutional accountablity, and navigating change without losing organizational stability.
Resource Mobilization and Local Fundraising — How to identify, approach, and retain diverse funding sources — from individual donors and local businesses to corporate partners, community giving platforms, and public fundraising campaigns, including GivingTuesday.
Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (PSEA) — Safeguarding principles, community accountability mechanisms, reporting pathways, and how to embed a culture of protection across organizational operations, communications, and field activities.
Advocacy and Stakeholder Engagement — How to use evidence, community voice, and strategic communication to influence decisions, build alliances, and create the enabling environment that the communities these organizations serve need most.
Organizational Sustainability — How to build an organization that outlasts any single project or donor. Covering strategic planning, income diversification, institutional identity, and the practices that keep organizations relevant, resilient, and growing.
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Impact & Achievements
IMPACT AND ACHIEVEMENTS
The programme is active across three regions Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar, and Songwe and is reaching 30 civil society organizations through 90 individual participants, three per organization, in intensive five-day physical training workshops.
Zanzibar's workshop, hosted at Tumekuja School from 27th to 31st July 2026, brought together ten organizations working across youth sport and inclusion, gender equity, child rights, legal aid, community development, and climate resilience. Dar es Salaam and Songwe workshops have reached ten organizations each, spanning communities from urban Dar es Salaam to peri-urban and rural Songwe.
Beyond the technical curriculum, the programme has created a visible and documented connection between institutional capacity building and GivingTuesday Tanzania's tenth anniversary milestone. All 30 participating organizations received a dedicated session on using GivingTuesday as a practical resource mobilization platform, equipping them to run their first community-facing fundraising campaigns on December 1, 2026, the most significant expansion of GivingTuesday Tanzania's participant base in the movement's ten-year history.
The programme's coaching and mentorship phase is actively supporting organizations to apply their learning in their own contexts. High-performing organizations are on track to access seed funding for community interventions before the end of 2026, with a focus on interventions that directly benefit children, adolescents, and their families.
Most significantly, this programme is building something that no single training can achieve alone: confidence. Confidence in these organizations' ability to lead, to account for resources, to tell their story compellingly, and to ask for what their communities need. That confidence, sustained through ongoing mentorship and peer learning, is what will make the investment in these thirty organizations matter not only in 2026 but in the years that follow.
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