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Practice Areas

An Internal Team With a Particular Set of Skills

Civil Society

Nascent’s civil society initiatives engage citizens and institutions at the regional level( e.g. PTAs and head teachers) and across national agencies of Education, Health, Agriculture, Water and Energy, and Municipal Councils, to solve their own problems with native tools, coordination and resources. We work closely with ministries and agencies to increase and develop transparency protocols. Our comprehensive approach to governance therefore includes:

  • Capacity Building for Government officials and education stakeholders in Policy drafting / advocacy
  • Establishing and strengthening PTAs and other community organizations to participate and take long term ownership of Initiatives
  • Increasing the knowledge of PTAs and school administrators in School Management, utilizing a similar model in non-education initiatives
  • Policy influencing and advocacy
  • Capacity building for local NGOs, Community groups and Associations

 

Projects

Gender

Nascent Solutions is a woman founded and predominantly woman run organization. Our programming targets women as intersectional change agents in the African context being key decision makers in matters relating to children, the family and the broader community. We promote the empowerment of women through education, business and agriculture training and apply community-wide behavior change modalities to achieve gender equality across many populations. Our gender and women focussed programming includes

  • Violence Against Women Progams
  • Microfinance Business Training and Women’s Group Development
  • Literacy and Fiance Training For Women
  • Computer Literacy Training For Women
  • Girls Education Sensitization -through social media, community leaders, radio broadcasts and International Women’s Day Celebrations
  • Girls Education Initiatives
  • Maternal and Child Care Initiatives
  • Women Focussed Nutrition Training

 

Projects

 

 

Youth

Africa’s youth is beset by the problems of malnutrition, disease and poor education. All three of these factors interact to put the African child at severe health risk and make the attainment of a fulfilling productive life a difficult prospect. Nascent works to bolster the health, nutrition, and education of the African child by aggressively targeting preventative sanitation, promoting a culture of hygiene, facilitating proper nutrition and robust early literacy education. Our comprehensive focus on youth is expressed in programs that include.

  • School Feeding Initiatives for Primary School Children in Poor Communities
  • School Infrastructure including the construction of classrooms, bathrooms, and toilets.
  • Sanitation, Health and Hygiene initiatives including deworming, well and handwashing station construction and hygiene sensitization
  • Literacy curriculum development and teacher training programs to give instructors the best tools to impact children positively.
  • Applying innovation and technology to bring literacy learning tools and books to poor rural youth.
  • Constructing and stocking libraries in rural schools.

 

Projects

 

Climate Smart Ag.

Africa has been identified as the region at most risk of climate change due to its high dependence on natural resources and rainfed agriculture. Current climate related stresses such as drought, floods, rainfall variability, coupled with low adaptivity, make African countries highly vulnerable to climate change. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an integrated approach to managing sustainable agricultural development that addresses the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change. CSA can be used to help small-holder farmers adapt to climate change and at the same time mitigate greenhouse gas (GHS) emissions.
Nascent offers the following climate smart agriculture training to small-holder farmers:

  • Sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes by producing more food through use of improved well adapted crop varieties, adopting mixed farming and sustainable soil management.
  • Adapting and building resilience to climate change by reducing vulnerability to pests, drought, disease and other shocks through crop rotations (e.g. rotating cereals with legumes) and use of early maturing crop varieties.
  • Reducing and/or removing greenhouse gases emissions by pursuing lower emissions for each kilo of food produced and through avoiding deforestation from agriculture and identifying ways to suck carbon out of the atmosphere by adoption of agroforestry to increase carbon stocks of crops and pastureland.

 

Projects

 

M & E

Nascent Solutions believes that improving programs requires robust monitoring, evaluation, and research (MER). Nascent also believes the burden of data collection should never outweigh the value of the information gathered. We help funders and clients assess the value of each indicator and the trade-offs inherent in expanding the size or complexity of their monitoring strategy. Most important, Nascent believes MER should be action-oriented, meant to assist stakeholders to make better decisions.
Nascent offers the following MER expertise to funders and clients:

  • Independent evaluation and quality assessment services in the education, health, agriculture, food security, nutrition, and gender sectors. Nascent boasts evaluation methodology expertise and experience in several sectors. We are proficient in evaluating-large scale projects in challenging environments, utilizing a variety of methods and tools among a range of stakeholders and beneficiaries.
  • Design and implementation of tailored monitoring systems for the collection, analysis, and use of routine data. Nascent strives to work within existing MER structures and processes and to identify pre-existing champions for MER. We work with funders and clients to articulate specific, measurable, achievable project goals and link those goals to the most useful metrics for success. Further, we establish monitoring systems that continually improve as programs evolve.
  • Mixed-methods research to address learning agendas and plug gaps in evidence. Nascent’s subject matter experts generate quantitative and qualitative evidence to improve program design and influence policy.
  • Guidance in the integration of technology in M&E processes, via mobile data collection, dashboards, GIS mapping, and other techniques. Nascent has long experience leveraging technology to improve the cost-efficiency, quality, and timeliness of data for improved decision-making.
  • Capacity building among staff and stakeholders on best practices in theory of change design, performance indicator design, data systems design, study design, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and data collection, management, analysis, visualization, and utilization.

 

Crisis Response

Nascent’s small HQ staff and agile field teams uniquely position our organization to mobilize quickly to handle crisis. In crisis situations we prioritize an effective and oranized response plan with a simplified responsibility and command structure, clear communication and distribution channels, and verifiable beneficiary outcomes monitored in truncated intervals. Our field teams are adept in the following primary components of crisis response:

  • Agile Programming in response to environmental, socio-political, and cultural incidents, including supply chain disruptions.
  • Food allocation, distribution and transportation
  • Medical Supplies allocation distribution and transportation.
  • Rapid community sensization and mobilization

 

Innovation/Tech.

Nascent utilizes modern tools and methods in the implementation of our vision. We tap indigenous resources and creativity in developing strategies to meet our vision of a self-reliant and poverty free Africa. We deploy technology where possible to expand the opportunities of the poor in rural communities without access to critical development and learning resources.

 

Projects

TIP

Contemporary Africa is plagued with the incidious practice of Trafficking In Persons. Much of the time the trafficked persons are children, and young women, who may further fall victim to sexual abuse. Social insecurity and poverty often compel parents to put their children in the care of distant acquaintances and relatives who promise to educate the children or pay the family remuneration. In many instances these arrangements effectively become akin to indentured servitude or slavery. Nascent Solutions works in all our field locations to end the practice of Trafficking In Persons and re-unite separated family members where possible.

 

Projects

WASH

Nascent Solutions manages disease vector mitigation through critical-medical-supply delivery, hygiene promotion/education and sanitation, specifically handwashing. We work with local communities, traditional and national institutions of governance to implement multi-faceted sanitation strategies. Our initiatives involve:

  • Deploying innovative ideas to minimize incidental transmission of pathogens, such as implementing footpedal triggers in our handwashing stations to eliminate the transmission of vectors through communal touching of the faucet in school environments.
  • Rapid robust infrastructure construction from foot-pedal operated handwashing stations in schools, to the delivery of beds to rural clinics, to the construction of boreholes for clean water and sanitary bathrooms and clean classrooms. Our in country and HQ implementation and technical experts apply both scientific knowledge socio-cultural understanding, sensitization and buy-in to effect lasting behavior change in WASH.
  • To address the heightened risk posed by COVID-19 Nascent Solutions will is re-prioritizing sensitization on the importance of sanitation, specifically hand-washing as well as all other best-practices as adviced by the WHO to curtail communal transmission of the virus accross all our programs.

 

Projects