Community Groups Can Be Accountable w/Suzanne Smith

Community Groups Can Be Accountable

Why community organizations struggle with accounting and what we can do about it Interview with Suzanne Smith

Suzanne Smith has lived and worked abroad for over 20 years. Her focus is on training and capacity building. She began as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, working at a rural clinic and focusing on child survival. She went on to work in Bangladesh and then Mozambique, where she managed a microcredit program. She then turned her focus to working with community groups, village health workers and nurses, to strengthen outreach and organizational capacity in the midst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Suzanne has worked in Afghanistan, where she helped design and then implemented a life and work skills training for female high school teachers as part of USAID’s PROMOTE.

She likes to distill complicated processes to their essence and create systems that are simple and easy to understand. Her trainings are accessible, fun, engaging, and most importantly she makes sure people leave feeling good about themselves and confident in their ability to learn new things

Suzanne founded Accountable Partners to make sure community based organizations have the systems, skills and support they need to account for donor funds accurately and transparently, to the last dollar spent.

Oftentimes small partners simply do not know how to fulfill a donor’s accounting requirements. More and more, International Donors and NGOs are partnering with small community organizations to achieve their development goals. While programs are being funded and progress is being made, too often these small partners fail to satisfy their donor’s accounting requirements – requirements that are necessary to a fulfill donor’s fiduciary responsibility. Without clear and accurate financial reports from their partners, donors hesitate to disburse the larger funds necessary to scale up activities, and sometimes small partners may lose their funding entirely. Accountable Partners developed a simplified accounting system specifically for small community organizations. We then created The Accountable Partners Academy so we could teach it. The Academy provides NGO/donor field staff with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to train their small partners in simplified accounting. We know that simple is transparent, simple is accessible and simple is sustainable. The result of our Academy is accurate and transparent financial reports from small partners to their donors.