Challenges to NGOs’ ability to bid for funding due to the repatriation of volunteers: The case of Samoa

Although there are an increasing number of funding facilities accessible for non-government organisations in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, critics suggest that it is still insufficient. Non-government organisations provide many essential services across the world, especially in the developing world, where they supplement or in some instances extend the government services. With services from health to gender issues to humanitarian support, non-government organisations continue to grapple with insufficiency of core and programming funding and unstable staffing. In Samoa, technical assistance through government volunteers supplemented the need for expert human resource and enabled the ability to apply for funding. With the mass repatriation of government volunteers such as Australian Volunteers, American Peace Corps and Japanese International Cooperation Agency, it resulted in a sudden and massive gap in technical human resource, equipped to apply for the rapidly expanding number of funding options. Through the experiences of a non-government organisation worker and an academic researcher based in Samoa, this piece shares the current experiences and potential repercussions of this sudden change in the non-government sector and suggestions moving forward to utilize the existing expertise in country in the academic sector to support non-government organizations to access funding.