The Global Environment Facility Small Grant Programme (GEF-SGP) at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ghana announces the 2021/22 "call for proposals" to award small grants of up to US$50,000 to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and community groups to undertake a systems analysis approach to the development and implementation of solutions that address upstream, midstream, and downstream management of plastic pollution, including baseline analysis, advocacy for policy development and implementation, development and implementation of waste management models, education and campaigns.

The grant would be applied to the following activities:

1)     Systems baseline analysis and preparation of baseline report and national action plan

• Baseline: analyze who is producing/using what plastics, where, and how to dispose of the plastic waste
• Stakeholders’ consultation and identification: what plastics are essential? How to minimize the use or import of plastics? What actions will be needed to achieve desired outcomes to eliminate non-essential plastics? What government policies are needed to implement the changes? What activities should be undertaken to shift human behaviors? (A series of stakeholders’ workshops, meetings, and focus group discussions to identify areas of reduction).
• Design and implementation of activities in the national action plans.

2)     Development and implementation of community-based zero waste management systems demonstration sites (waste intelligent communities and cities)

• Prevent, reduce, and eliminate unnecessary and non-essential plastic products to stop pollution at their source.
• Develop and implement actions to rethink, reuse, reduce, recycle, and environmentally dispose of waste, following waste management hierarchy.
• Support the development of ecological alternatives and solutions.
• Incorporate informal waste sectors and enhance livelihoods for informal workers.
• Conduct regular clean-up for awareness-raising advocacy and behavioral change.

3)     Policy development and implementation

• Support policy formulation and implementation (including a ban on single-use plastics, extended producers’ or importers’ responsibility, and incentives for clean environment).
• Undertake awareness-raising and advocacy for the ban of non-essential single-use plastics.
• Conduct Government-civil society-private sector meetings/dialogues to formulate and implement policies and regulations.

4)     Awareness-raising, public participation and global campaigns

• Develop awareness-raising materials and outreach activities.
• Develop and implement intensive and regular awareness-raising and public participation activities (such as weekly clean-up activities, radios/TVs programs, and social media campaigns).
• Organize the Annual Zero Single-Use Plastic Week Campaign, June 8^th World Ocean’s Day and/or Clean-up Campaign on World Clean-up Day on the third Saturday of September with whole-of-society participation (high-level government officials, businesses, and civil society organizations).

Eligibility

To qualify for the grant award, the applicant must:

• be non-governmental or non-profit organizations with a legal mandate to operate;
• be community groups/community-based organizations, and social enterprise organizations recognized by the relevant municipal authorities;
• have relevant experience and proven records of working with communities and groups in environmental, forestry and/or agricultural related activities and should be based or already have a working presence in the respective countries and priority geographical areas;
• be the lead organization that should propose a plan of engaging governments, research institutes, communities, media, and other key stakeholders. University/research institutes can be engaged for the baseline analysis.

Project Geographic Area

This project aims at scaling up an integrated community-based plastic waste management system in three municipalities in the Great Accra region namely: Korle-Klottey Municipal (Capital: Osu) Krowor Municipal (Capital: Nungua), La-Dade-Kotopon Municipal (Capital: La) and Ledzokuku Municipal (Capital: Teshie-Nungua)

Submitted project proposals should take a systems analysis to understand the plastic pollution problem in these areas and propose solutions. The submitted project proposals should:

• include all of the four components.
• succinctly describe the problems related to the geographic area.
• explain how the proposed project objectives, outputs and activities would have a concrete impact and contribute towards the achievements of the identified problems.
• demonstrate how the project is aligned to the targets and objectives of the SGP Country Program Strategy (CPS).
• show that the projects are innovative, impactful, and sustainable.
• promote social inclusion, including gender equality and women’s empowerment.

What will the project support?

The project will:

• Focus on prevention, reduction and elimination of non-essential plastic use, particularly single plastic use.
• Identify producers, distributors, and users’ responsibilities, and develop policies on “extended producer responsibility” and “polluter pays” policies and instruments.
• Support women, youth, people with disability and offer livelihoods activities to develop and pilot ecological alternatives to single-use plastic.
• Support formalization and empowerment of informal waste sector, and develop capacity for the informal waste sector
• Intensive awareness, education and civic engagement must be incorporated.
• Identify and develop good practices and scale up good practices through learning, sharing and policy adoption.
• Strong government support and policy development activities.
• Strong partnerships with local governments, businesses, and civil society organizations.

What the project will not support

• Pure clean-up activities will not be effective. Clean-up could be part of awareness-raising strategies, but no project should be funded only to clean up local trash.
• Recycling and remanufacturing of plastics are in most cases not economically viable and should not be a priority of this program. Recycling can be funded as part of a temporary solution only if: 1) the country has an existing recycling facility; 2) markets for products are available with demonstrated economic viability; and 3) environmental safeguards analysis is conducted. If recycling activity is included, empowering women in the informal waste sector should be the focus. No funding should be invested in creating a recycling facility, infrastructure, and products.
• Pure awareness-raising activities will not drive behavior changes. Awareness-raising should be part of a comprehensive offer that includes reduction, demonstration, and policy measures to address plastic pollution.
• The CSO’s responses will allow for a collaborative review and interaction with the SGP to get the necessary briefing on the project.
• The SGP secretariat will make sure that applicants understand the project so that their responses could be measured against the evaluation criteria and other applicants’ responses.
• Clarify any questions that come in from the applicant about the project.

Time Framework:

Call for proposals are opened from the date of this advertisement until January 31, 2022. Applications would be processed as and when they are received, and successful applicants would be notified accordingly. The full details on the eligibility criteria, preferred bio-geographic areas, the project strategy, guidelines for applications, and project application document are attached to this call. However for any further information, please send a request to george.ortsin@undp.org or lois.sarpong@undp.org; or write directly to The National Coordinator, UNDP GEF-SGP, P. O. Box 1423, Accra. Tel/WhatsApp. +2330505740909.

For further details, please download the call for proposal document which includes the application process and template here.