CHARLES KONG SOO

charles.kong­soo@guardian.co.tt

To­day is World NGO Day, which is held to recog­nise, cel­e­brate and ho­n­our the con­tri­bu­tions and pro­found im­pact that these in­de­pen­dent, not-for-prof­it non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions have on the world.

Last year, CSO Go, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with The Crop­per Foun­da­tion, host­ed its first World NGO Day vir­tu­al fair.

The event at­tract­ed over 150 CSOs (Civ­il So­ci­ety Or­gan­i­sa­tions) to the two-day event and be­cause of its ini­tial suc­cess, ad­dress­ing var­i­ous top­ics such as the en­vi­ron­ment, and so­cial and hu­man­i­tar­i­an is­sues, more par­tic­i­pants have been reg­is­tered for this year’s CSO Go’s two-day vir­tu­al sem­i­nar to mark World NGO Day 2023.

Day one, themed The Im­por­tance of good gov­er­nance for NGOs, will be staged to­day, while The role of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion in a mod­ern NGO will be the theme to­mor­row.

Speak­ing with the T&T Guardian over the week­end, Crop­per Foun­da­tion CEO Omar Mo­hammed said: “We have over 200 per­sons reg­is­tered over two days al­ready, it’s a con­tin­u­a­tion of a very suc­cess­ful event from last year.

“This year, on Feb­ru­ary 27 and 28, we’re go­ing to be fo­cused on the role of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion in a mod­ern NGO and go­ing to touch on the tools avail­able to them.

“If you’re reg­is­tered for non-prof­it in T&T, you have ac­cess to an amaz­ing range of Mi­crosoft prod­ucts for free, as well as Can­va, a free-to-use on­line graph­ic de­sign tool for up to 20 per­sons if reg­is­tered as non-prof­it.

“There’s al­so da­ta pri­va­cy, what it means for NGOs, cy­ber se­cu­ri­ty, cor­po­rate gov­er­nance, what does it mean to have a board, what it means for NGOs in terms of trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty.”

Asked if there were any world or ex­ter­nal in­flu­ences that can af­fect the or­gan­i­sa­tion, such as the war in Ukraine or AI (Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence), he said a lot of what they did was fo­cused on sus­tain­abil­i­ty and the con­cept of think glob­al, act lo­cal ap­proach.

Mo­hammed said every­thing was in­ter­con­nect­ed, not­ing the world food sup­ply was af­fect­ed by the sup­ply chain dis­rup­tion and ex­ac­er­bat­ed by the war in Ukraine, while cli­mate change im­pacts every facet, from health and mi­gra­tion.

Re­gard­ing AI, he said the or­gan­i­sa­tion had been fo­cused on bring­ing this sort of in­no­va­tion space with­in the Caribbean for civ­il so­ci­ety.

Mo­hammed added that the group had just com­plet­ed a Na­tion­al Ge­o­graph­ic grant and worked with TT­LAB, from UWI, to pi­lot test how AI can be used to help small farm­ers in T&T and oth­er is­lands by us­ing drone tech­nol­o­gy to map their farms and gath­er more up-to-date ground da­ta.

He sug­gest­ed that AI can al­so be used to help pull cit­i­zen opin­ion to­geth­er faster on is­sues such as pol­i­cy and leg­is­la­tion.

Mo­hammed said reg­u­lar cit­i­zens can sup­port NGOs in many dif­fer­ent ways, such as vol­un­teer­ing, pro­vid­ing fi­nan­cial sup­port through do­na­tions and con­tri­bu­tions, at­tend­ing events by NGOs in their com­mu­ni­ties, and join­ing groups on so­cial me­dia with like-mind­ed con­sci­en­tious peo­ple who share their pas­sion and in­ter­ests.

He said CSO Go was cre­at­ed to be a voice for the civ­il so­ci­ety sec­tor as a whole, and as a ser­vice ex­change hub and dig­i­tal plat­form that con­nects skilled pro­fes­sion­als with civ­il so­ci­ety or­gan­i­sa­tions.

Mo­hammed ex­plained that CSO Go was led by TCF with some ini­tial fund­ing by the IDB and was meant to be­come a one-stop dig­i­tal por­tal to sup­port the civ­il so­ci­ety sec­tor in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ways.

He said hav­ing events like the World NGO Day sem­i­nars will en­able them to build an e-learn­ing plat­form on the site, with civ­il so­ci­ety-spe­cif­ic on­line cours­es and project man­age­ment and oth­ers com­ing up, while peo­ple can al­so post jobs, vol­un­teer­ing and fund­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties.