Solidaridad Network (West Africa)

The premise of the structure is that it promotes capacity building: strengthening Solidaridad teams in the region, enabling them to take control of supervisory tasks and to manage programming themselves. The regional Solidaridad teams cooperate with their own partners on the planning, implementation, communication and evaluation of programmes, and on reporting their results.

SOLIDARIDAD NETWORK – LEGAL ENTITIES

The organization consists of 8 regional centers throughout the world with a Network Secretariat connecting the regions. The Network Secretariat (officially Solidaridad Network Foundation, founded in 2011) is located in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in the same office building as Solidaridad Europe, one of the regional centers. The Network Secretariat consists of the Executive Director with a small staff surrounding him and delivering the following tasks that support the whole network:

• Providing services for the development and enforcement of our quality assurance systems and standards for financial management, accountability and control, planning, monitoring and evaluation, ICT infrastructure and human resource management.
• Responsible for global communication, including our international website and the development of tools for global branding and communication guidelines.
• Facilitating the process of global policy development by supporting our global organizational entities such as the Executive Director, the Executive Board of Directors, the Global Commodity Teams and the Global Account Teams.

All managing directors have to adhere to agreed policies and have to stimulate optimal cooperation, open communication and knowledge exchange between the regional centers. Furthermore, they are responsible for fostering a “giving factor” between regions, making fair deals on payment for joint and mutual services and joining forces in order to be stronger together.

In order to ensure efficient daily operations and an efficient payment structure, the eight regional expertise centres are grouped on five continents, each with their own supervisory structure. Legal entities for these five continental Solidaridad regions are established in Utrecht, the Netherlands (for Europe), San Francisco Bay Area, USA (for North America), Panama City, Panama (for Latin America), Nairobi, Kenya (for Africa) and Hong Kong, China (for Asia).