long term partnership

CARE's Long-term, "organization-to-organization" partnerships are designed to be true partnerships that enable both partners to get exposure to and learn from the comparative advantages of the other.

In these partnerships, CARE and the Partner NGOs will build institutional relationships over a number of years, reinforcing each other's strategies and activities in ways that were not possible before. This will happen independently of any ongoing project partnerships between the participating organizations. In other words, project-level MOUs between the NGOs and CARE may come and go, but will not be a necessary precondition for continuation of the long-term partnership.

What might happen during a long-term partnership? We envision the following:

• Collaboration towards common and inter-related regional program strategies
• Sharing of experience and lessons learned in advocacy and rights-based programming
• Support in the design of new projects, and the evaluation of ongoing projects
• Participation in each other's conferences, workshops and training programs
• Assistance to one another in staff recruitment and human resources management
• Staff exchanges, internships, and mentoring programs
• Sharing of fund-raising and constituency-building strategies
• Development of common, mutually-supportive external relations strategies

These relationships will be built not around the flow of money, but around shared principles and values, a shared vision of the impact on poverty, shared hopes for the future of Bangladesh, mutual accountability, and shared commitment to responsible and transparent governance.

The first two NGOs selected as long term partners for CARE are People's Oriented Program Implementation (POPI) and Bangladesh Rural Improvement foundation (BRIF). In FY-04 CARE extended its partnership with SAP Bangladesh, Samaj Kallan Sangstha and Pradipan.