The Resource Management Advisory Committee (RMAC) of the villages were gifted new and important resources from the Niue Ocean Wide (NOW) Project earlier this morning at the Niue Golf and Sports Club.
In efforts to develop the NOW Trust Fund, the project has been working closely with the village councils to develop their RMAC village committees and projects-based interventions.
NOW Project gifted the village RMAC committees with resources such as tables, chairs, a laptop and projector to help with their development.
BCN News spoke with one of the key leaders of the NOW Project and President of Tofia Niue Coral Pasisi about the programme held today.
“The Niue Ocean Wide Project is developing a sustainable financing mechanism – the NOW Trust – to leverage funding to be able to support the work of Niue as a whole with ocean conservation, resilience and sustainable development. We’ve learnt over the years that project-based intervention helps to mobilize money in action for a short period of time and once the project is finished all the activities finish.”
It’s not an easy task for many countries, especially small villages like Niue to maintain project-based interventions, says Coral Pasisi.
People get tired of being consulted and having their hopes high for a three-year plan where there is funding and activities only to be brought back to where they started after the project is over.
“This was really about developing a transformational change in the way we operate and to provide that stream of financing in a predictable way over a long period of time to the villages – through what are called the Resource Management Advisory Committees – so that they can plan their interventions over a sustained period of time and they have a predictable amount of funding coming from our NOW Trust once its up and going.”
“We already have some of those finances as seed funding brought onboard and this was the first opportunity to provide every village through their RMAC the capability to have meetings through a number of chairs, tables, laptops, and projectors so that they can run the consultations with their villages as they need to decide on the activities that they want funded with their money every year.”
“We were able to present both the Trust how it operates, where we are at with capitalization of that Trust and the initial seed money that has been used to deliver some of the goodies that they got today but also advise on the accounts that they have now set up or that we are holding funding to support them as they go forward.”
Coral says that this is a transformational approach that would allow the people of Niue to lead their own way with projects-based interventions and not rely on international projects and consultants.
Bringing Niuean capabilities together to design something that Niueans have made themselves to deliver for the future of the Niue people, says Coral.