CAPACITY TRAINING SPURS NGO DEVELOPMENT

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/ Following a capacity-building training funded by Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the head of Dornogobi aimag's Healthy Life Green World NGO has been able to raise project funds and has a better understanding of civil society organizations, the SDC website published Monday. "The training had a big impact on me," Ms Tserentsoo said. "It allowed me to understand that an NGO could write funding proposals to support projects. Before that I thought that all funds needed to be raised through voluntary donations". Prior to the training, the Healthy Life Green World NGO, established in 2010 to provide support for people with disabilities and to orphans, operated without a strategic plan and on minimal funding. However, after learning the basics of proposal-writing during the training, Ms Tserentsoo went from having no operational budget to managing a budget of three million togrog within the space of just a few months. Her first grant of one million togrog funded the purchase of equipment to process food to enable the NGO to support a local family. This was followed up by a second grant of one million to buy school supplies and toys for disabled orphans. She also received funding to address the health issues of the youth in the area, and raised 0.6 million to support the planting of 500 trees in the otherwise treeless terrain of her local area. The funds for these four projects came from a range of sources, including local companies and the local government.