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Millennium Development Goals

The importance of capacity building in developing countries is illustrated by its presence as a separate budget line in formal costings of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) presented to the 2005 UN “Millennium+5” summit in New York. These estimates suggested that a figure of $7 billion pa should be earmarked by international aid agencies for capacity building, a significant proportion of the $50 billion pa recommended additional aid.

This report prepared by the Millennium Project pointed to the need for a wide range of capacity building interventions. It called in particular for “massive” human resource training programmes for community-based and local government workers involved in areas such as water, agriculture, nutrition and health. Strengthening public sector delivery with adequate staffing and remuneration was a recurrent theme of the report, as was advocacy of the use of media technologies such as e-learning and community radio.

Bhutanese villagers mapping resources © Piet van der Poel

The diversity of these recommendations reflects the many contexts in which capacity building takes place; like its parent concept of development, it is a loose term which is difficult to pigeon-hole in description. It is as relevant to the highest level of government as the most humble village. The tools of its trade range from sophisticated leadership courses to diagrams explaining water pump maintenance. Individual organizations such as local community groups are crucial providers of capacity building programmes whilst themselves often lacking capacity to sustain their mission. Improving internal management structures, access to information and technology, and networking are integral to institutional capacity building.

Capacity Building in Government

Nthombimbi Primary School, Zambia © United Nations Children's Fund

The Millennium Project report listed 10 “quick win” recommendations for accelerating progress towards the MDGs, one of which provides a good example of the pitfalls of high level prescriptions which fail to consider capacity issues. Ending user fees for health and education is an attractive policy option for African governments to create capacity for poverty reduction, stimulated in recent years by generous debt relief. In practice, waiving fees for primary education has been problematic as neither teacher numbers nor classroom space have been able to cope with the influx of new pupils.

Adequate human resources adequately rewarded are therefore the starting point for achieving the standards of good governance which are believed to be critical to successful development. Capacity building programmes at government level will seek to achieve outcomes of sound policy-making backed by transparent institutions with high standards of financial management and reliable human development statistics.

Similar capacity building needs apply even more at local government levels which are notoriously bureaucratic and ineffective in developing countries. As decentralization has entered the mainstream of development models over recent years, there is a constant search for successful capacity building templates which can been replicated over multiple locations.
Capacity Building in Civil Society

Limitations of local government units create the space frequently occupied by community-based organizations (CBOs) which themselves may be supported by regional or national non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The CBOs typically possess expert understanding of the needs of local people and are best placed to create the sense of community ownership and a feedback mechanism so important to development projects.

Unfortunately, no amount of this valuable expertise can protect these grassroots CBOs and NGOs from their own Achilles heel of incapacity to sustain themselves. Invariably they are dependent on donor project finance which by definition has a beginning and an end – the fickle availability and timing of such funds leaves small organizations highly vulnerable. In their strategies for internal capacity NGO managers often find themselves torn between their non-financial mission and generating earned income. The challenge of diversified financial models is particularly acute for southern-based civil society, poorly equipped with relevant fundraising knowledge, and cut off from an affluent corporate sector.

INTRAC training © International NGO Training and Research Centre

Capacity building programmes for civil society therefore focus on sustainability as the key outcome. Tools will include strategic engagement of volunteers, training in organizational management, use of online peer group networking, building alliances, and improvement of fundraising and donor relationship skills.

Institutional donors are aware of these problems but face their own internal conflicts. Both bilateral government donors and the international NGOs are under pressure from their stakeholders (taxpayers and private givers) to maximise the number of “beneficiaries” per dollar of funding. They have a

Sir Hilary Benn, UK Secretary of State for International Development © Peter Armstrong

natural preference for project finance over core organizational concerns. Relationships can also break down over strategic disagreements and cross-cultural misunderstandings – new theories for effective community development and its evaluation hatched in western conference centres do not always chime in with equally innovative ideas generated at village level.

These faultlines in the current mainstream structure for development projects may create openings for the new breed of social entrepreneur whose ideas of capacity building are likely to be more tuned to success of an organization rather than success of an individual project.
Community Development

Whatever the concerns of the capacity of government and civil society to do their job effectively, their role is a means to the end that really matters – that of building capacity for individuals to realize their potential for better lives. Unfortunately, top-down perceptions of what constitutes “better lives” do not always coincide with real needs. Benefits given, rather than asked for, at the wrong time, to the wrong people on the wrong skill-sets will prolong rather than alleviate poverty environments. A key dimension of capacity building for communities is therefore the “needs assessment”, involving techniques such as “participatory rural appraisal” to understand what interventions will trigger the most positive response and impact.

This is not to say that there is no place for educating communities in needs which are known to improve prospects for the well-being of their families; for example sanitation programmes are unlikely to succeed without appropriate hygiene education. Educational capacity building has been particularly well served by the tool of community radio, especially in Africa.

Capacity building for women

The motive for effective results also lies behind the tailoring of capacity building projects for women and, to a lesser extent, young people, as these groups are known to be key agents for poverty reduction and economic endeavour. Sexual and reproductive health programmes create capacity for significant improvement in the welfare of women and children whilst the performance of microfinance enterprise has been shown to be superior in the hands of women. As well as the obvious health benefits, improving access to safe water saves collection time, creating capacity for women to work and for girls to go to school.

Capacity building for broader livelihoods such as farming and fishing often involves literacy programmes as well as more obvious skills training. Literacy is possibly even more relevant in creating livelihoods in the rapidly expanding problems of urban slum environments.
Partnerships for Capacity Building

Given the difficulties experienced at each of these levels of capacity building, it is no surprise to find that institutional donors encourage formal project alliances in which capacity shortcomings can be overcome through parties working together, sometimes with private sector involvement. These programmes can involve quite complex combinations of government, business and civil society. There are also numerous national and international NGO networks which pool resources and purport to share knowledge and best practice.

Biwater campaign

One form of partnership in capacity building projects has stirred up global controversy – public-private partnerships in which municipal government engages the private sector to deliver public services, ranging from health to energy. Many of these arrangements in developing countries extend to wholesale privatization, even for an essential resource such as water. Multilateral institutions which encourage this path argue that private corporations have access to capital and expertise to deliver value for money and efficiency. Opponents point to the irreconcilable conflict between business aims to maximize return on capital and the social goal to make safe water available to all, rich or poor. There is evidence that private water projects have created capacity for middle class areas at the expense of the poor. As a result, arrangements involving the private sector in public service delivery in developing countries are now more likely to feature partnership than privatisation.
ICTs for Capacity Building

Rural Knowledge Centre

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have become an integral component of capacity building at all levels. The concept of e-governance can encourage citizen participation in the decision-making process and make government more accountable, transparent and effective. For NGOs, strategic use of the internet can strengthen campaigning and fundraising; even in Africa with its relatively poor technology infrastructure, civil society organizations are keen to explore the potential of the internet to improve their performance. And in both Africa and Asia the concept of village knowledge centres is inspired by the prospect of building local capacity through online research and networking. Distance learning has also increased its outreach within developing countries through online tools. The provision of local language content in these initiatives becomes a vital component to complete the circle of capacity building.

Mobile for Good © Peter Armstrong

New mobile phone technologies threaten to eclipse even this catalogue of achievements. In particular they overcome the disadvantage of poor landline coverage so that the ubiquitous PC of western households may find itself leapfrogged in Africa. Already there are successful and sustainable models for provision of recruitment, health and agriculture information by phone in sub-Saharan Africa. Given the enthusiasm of Africans for phone technology, such programmes provide a rare example of beneficiaries requiring little in the way of capacity building support to learn how to use the development tool.



This Guide has been compiled primarily by reference to the OneWorld archive of capacity building articles and to an earlier version of the OneWorld Capacity Building Guide first published in 2003 with material provided by Volunteer Editor Michael Lagcao.

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