The Story of a Certified NPO The Asia Christian Education Fund (ACEF) for Strengthening Its Organizational Foundation

Meanwhile, ACEF’s operations have been in crisis for nearly 20 years.
“Since the 2000s, Bangladesh has experienced remarkable economic development, and almost all children have begun to receive primary education. However, we were still doing the same activities we had been doing since our founding. By around 2004, the number of schools that we supported reached 90, and the budget exceeded 50 million yen, but since then the number of schools that we could support decreased. We could no longer secure that kind of budget.” Mr. Kawami recalled.
Mr. Oda served as Executive Director from 2019 to 2022, when ACEF’s very existence was in jeopardy.
“The over 1,000 members who had been supporting our activities since the establishment were aging. We depended on their membership fees and donations for 80-90% of our income. In addition, our local partner NGO, with whom we were supposed to have an equal relationship, was 95% dependent on remittances from ACEF for its income. In a sense, we were in a ‘vertical relationship’. After the terrorist attack on a restaurant in the capital, Dhaka, in 2016, we had to temporarily suspend our study tours. And in 2020, we were caught up in the coronavirus pandemic. ACEF found itself at a crossroads where it had to rebuild its organization.”

For this reason, ACEF applied to the “Panasonic NPO/NGO Support Funds for SDGs” and received a grant to strengthen its organizational foundation from 2020 to 2021.
“In the first year, we conducted an organizational diagnosis with the help of external people to identify the problems facing our organization. Instead of presenting the visible problems and their immediate solutions, we held a workshop based on a “systems thinking” approach to structurally understand how the underlying causes of each problem are intertwined and to create new changes. This allowed each of us to develop a sense of responsibility for our problems.”
Each workshop was attended by 20 to 30 people, including board members, councilors, members, office staff, and student volunteers. “After a while, we shifted the workshop online so that people from distant locations could participate and engage in in-depth discussions about what our goals were and whether they would be successful in the real world,” said Mr. Kawami.

In the second year, ACEF worked to address organizational problems identified in the organizational diagnosis. One of these was a lack of communication with the partner NGO. To address this problem, Mr. Oda visited Bangladesh in March 2020 to hold a workshop with them.
“We gathered all the NGO staff, told them frankly about the difficult situation ACEF was facing, and asked for their opinions. Even after the workshop, the boards on both sides continued to have online discussions, which led to a common understanding of our new direction, and they began to propose what they wished to undertake themselves.”
One of the new projects that emerged from this process was microfinancing (small loans) to women for educational purposes. “It is a mechanism whereby the local NGO provides small loans to parents and teachers to start small businesses, and the profits are used to pay for the children’s education. Furthermore, they agreed to reduce their dependency on ACEF by half within five years by establishing connections with local Japanese companies as new partners and exploring potential grants from the Bangladesh government.”
Through the dialogue during the workshop, ACEF formulated a new vision and mission, with the keyword “respecting the dignity of each individual” at its core. “We have shared this vision and mission at general meetings and member forums, and we have asked the schools where our board members and councilors teach to include a program on human dignity in their classes.”

ACEF has also made progress in another challenge, the generational change of board members. “We took into account gender balance and increased the ratio of women on the board to half. The local NGO also replaced its Executive Director and hired more female staff, which has improved the NGO’s openness, where people can easily express their opinions, and consequently improved the quality of communication.”
In addition, Mr. Kawami said that when study tours could not be conducted due to the coronavirus pandemic, volunteer high school and university students started crowdfunding and online seminars, which increased interest and donations from the younger generation. The funds raised were used for activities such as providing libraries for unofficial primary schools and scholarships. “We are now implementing an initiative to encourage children in kindergartens and elementary schools in Japan to make friends with children in Bangladesh through video and letter exchanges.”