Network Development
The GNRC network has had tremendous development since its inception in 2000. An open and flexible network, GNRC comprises over 1,200 organizations and individual members spread over seventy-five countries around the world. Currently, the GNRC has 77 Coordinators and Contact Persons across the 67 networks.
From April 2020 to October 2021, the GNRC Secretariat conducted an extensive assessment of the Network. The assessment exercise, through a participatory approach, involved in-depth interviews with members of the GNRC, religious leaders, partners, children, as well as directors and staff of Arigatou International. Interviewees and respondents came from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and North America regions. The assessment revealed the GNRC network as a diverse, multi-religious and multi-cultural platform building on its 20 years of extensive interfaith collaboration in shaping and advocating for a better world for children.
THE NETWORK DEVELOPMENT MATRIX
The Network Development Matrix was introduced after the assessment, as a tool to gauge the development progress of the Networks. This Matrix gauges the Network in several different capacities and places them into five stages: Germinal, Nascent, Expanding, Strengthening, and Maturing. Under these stages, the assessing criteria is based on the following, Network Building and Strengthening, Capacity and Development, Communication and Member Outreach, Programs/Projects/ Activities, And Advocacy. Once a country attains the assessing criteria in each stage, they are advanced to the next stage by the Secretariat.