Challenges

IsDB member Countries (MCs) face meta-level and numerous socio-economic challenges. Among these are poverty, fragility, and violent conflict, man-made and natural disasters, which often generates humanitarian crises including both internal displacement and refugee populations

As valuable development partners and developers, civil society organizations (CSOs) help to promote citizen participation as a foundation for innovation, enhance sustainability and alleviate poverty to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and especially SDG1. Empowering them can help achieve a stronger impact in reducing poverty and other sustainable development objectives.

In contribution to the efforts of achieving the SDGs and operationalizing the Competence, Linkage, Delivery and Funding tracks of the President 5-Year Programme and the 10-Year Strategy, which stress the need for IsDB to become a Bank of “network of developers”, the Bank has developed an innovative and transformative partnership program called “IsDB – ISFD NGOs Empowerment for Poverty Reduction Program”, which established a key platform called the Tadamon (Solidarity) initiative.  The NGO Empowerment program overarching impact includes the contribution to SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 16, and 17.

Toward a Solution

In a world with growing complexities, new innovative solutions – from technological progress to new ways of communicating, financing and marketing – are also critical to support development outcomes. The international aggregated Tadamon platform, which is a tool for empowering CSOs networking in the 57 Member Countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) by providing them with visibility, funding, capacity building and knowledge. Tadamon aims at (i) leveraging innovative financing to avail additional grant resources through non-traditional partners, philanthropists, foundations, private sector, and crowdfunding; and (ii) sharing experience and best practices through the Platform. Tadamon serves as a (Trip adviser) for citizens and the private sector to make it easier to financially support the humanitarian and development efforts of CSOs. This is done by linking numerous crowdfunding campaigns from several existing crowdfunding platforms. As a platform to connect the efforts of all the partners, Tadamon is committed to building stronger communities and helping those less fortunate.

 The Platform has a unique IMPACT model as follows:   

• Innovation: Tadamon uses cutting edge flexible financing mechanism to facilitate and support innovative ideas that have the potential to scale up and increase the humanitarian-development and building resilience.
• Mobilize Resources: use cutting edge flexible financing mechanisms such as crowdfunding and Islamic social financing. We build partnership across a range of avenues to mobilize resources to meet critical noble causes and build a sustainable source of support for vulnerable groups such as refugees and internally displaced people, orphans, people with disabilities and the most deprived.
• Promote: Tadamon showcases and celebrates the progress and achievements of our partners by helping CSOs to brand and package their impactful ideas and achievements to scale up and increase development results.
• Assist: Tadamon assists and empowers CSOs in IsDB Member Countries through institutional capacity development to effectively and efficiently respond to the needs of the MCs
• Connect: the platform connects and brings together networks of developers through mapping, screening of CSOs, sharing knowledge, experience, best practices and information
• Transform: Tadamon sparks change by investing in transformative projects and ideas that improve the socioeconomic conditions of hard-to-reach communities through CSOs campaigns and partnership commitments. 

The aggregated crowdfunding platform was officially launched by H.E. the President, IsDB in September 2019 on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York with other partners such as UNDP, UNHCR, Save the Children, Plan International, crowdfunding institutions, BADEA.  

To date, the following preliminary results have been achieved: (i)  over 21 development partners,  including the African Development Bank, UNHCR, Save the Children International, Plan International and Spark, signed declarations to support the initiative with a total contribution of approximately US$11.5 million; (ii) 26 MCs have so far officially endorsed and supported the program; (iii)  mapped and screened over 600 national Civil Society Organizations in member countries; (iv) 12 national awareness-raising, crowdfunding and capacity building programs have been conducted in MCs, notably introductory CSOs mapping workshops. These workshops gave the opportunity for CSO representatives to actively participate and provide important insight into the overall successes and challenges they face. Moreover, Government focal points and IsDB, ISFD and UNDP staff attended these events; (v) a distance learning capacity building program has been established in close partnership with Save the Children. The learning program will support CSOs institutional capacity efforts to raise funds, manage, implement, monitor and evaluate projects for grassroots communities; and (v) over US$ 800,000 have been mobilized through the Tadamon crowdfunding platform to support the hard-to-reach communities.

With 10,000 followers, Tadamon identifies and enhances the visibility of partners of the NGO Empowerment Program. It offers a comprehensive, easily searchable list of high-quality local CSOs with a proven record in the 57 OIC MCs . Additionally, it currently provides a bridge between different countries, CSOs and stakeholders including partnering organizations and donors. It connects grassroots communities working on development issues and brings together donors and practitioners from Africa, Asia, Europe and MENA.

Building on the existing NGO Empowerment Program and its Tadamon mechanisms, lessons learned and networks of developers, the Bank has also developed the Tadamon CSO Pandemic Response Accelerator Program to contribute to the immediate and medium-term efforts of the MCs to prevent, contain and respond to negative impacts of COVID-19 in 17 MCs affected by fragility and conflict, refugees and internally-displaced people. To date, the Tadamon CSO Pandemic Response Accelerator Program has raised over US$ 24.5 million of actual commitments from partners (or pledges under finalization) in 11 member countries with a target population of 7.3 million beneficiaries living in vulnerable communities

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