Capacity Building for International Development

The escalating profile of capacity building in international development is reflected in the sequence of global crisis summits that took place through 2009.

Farmers in Haiti © Grassroots International

The Declaration following the World Summit on Food Security makes repeated reference to capacity building, including a commitment to “strengthen the capacity of farmers and the capacity of farmers’ organizations.” Capacity building is also included in the list of objectives for the new Green Climate Fund announced in the Copenhagen Accord.

This surge of political recognition may inspire more countries to follow the example of Ethiopia in establishing a government ministry of capacity building. The UN Development Programme’s description of its core function stresses the need “to help develop the capacities required to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).” The report prepared by the Millennium Project for the 2005 UN "Millennium+5" summit in New York advocated 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.

The diversity of these recommendations reflects the many contexts in which capacity building takes place. It is as relevant to the highest level of government as the most humble village. The tools of its trade range from women’s 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

Another factor drawing attention to the subject of capacity building is the continuing debate about the most effective use of aid. A recurring frustration for international donors has been the lack of capacity of governments to deliver the intended programmes.

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

For example, ending user fees for health and education is an attractive policy option for African governments, stimulated by aid and debt relief. In practice, waiving fees for primary education has been problematic as neither teacher numbers nor classroom facilities have been able to cope with the influx of new pupils.

Political pressure to allocate generous aid budgets to post-conflict or natural disaster environments invariably hits the buffers of capacity. This largely accounts for by the disappointing development returns achieved for donors in Afghanistan and in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. Aid can be the antithesis of capacity, the drift into aid dependency snuffing out the growth of government institutions.

Adequate human resources adequately trained and rewarded are therefore the starting point for achieving the standards of good governance which are believed to be critical to successful development.

Such capacity building programmes at government level will seek to achieve outcomes of sound policy-making backed by transparent institutions. These should deliver high standards of law enforcement and financial management, supported by reliable human development statistics. These outcomes are highly ambitious and the training is often provided by controversial western “consultants” financed through a category of aid known as “technical assistance”.

Successful democracies are those which create space for citizens’ voices to be heard in calling governments to account for their actions. By the same token, global negotiations on issues such as trade and climate change often present the credentials of international democracy in poor light when richer countries take advantage of their capacity to buttress themselves with vast entourages of advisers.

At the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, African governments made their presence felt thanks in part to some determined efforts by donors to provide finance and training for negotiators.

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

Learning about living in Nigeria

Limitations of local government create the space frequently occupied by community-based organizations (CBOs). 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 regional 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.

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 natural preference for project finance over core organizational concerns.

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 attuned to success of an organization rather than success of an individual project.
Capacity Building in Community Development

Bhutanese villagers mapping resources © Piet van der Poel

Regardless 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 realise 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.

OneWorld South Asia village training program

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. 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.

Failure to work in partnership will often result in a failure to identify and respond to priority capacity needs. The preference of international health donors to focus on eradication of disease rather than partnering governments in the provision of general health facilities and staff is the prime example. The consequence is that good progress on MDG targets for HIV/AIDS and malaria coexists with significant failure to reduce child and maternal mortality rates.

Bolivians protesting against water privatisation © Julie Plasencia / AP / The UNESCO Courier

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 privatisation, 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 maximise return on capital and the duty of government to provide essential services to all, rich or poor.

There is evidence that private utility 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.
Climate Change and Capacity Building

The crisis of climate change illustrates the tendency of donor countries to overlook capacity shortcomings. For example, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) provided by the Kyoto Protocol aims to fund low emission energy production in developing countries. The almost complete failure of the CDM in Africa has been attributed to the complexity of the project management bureaucracy.

This lesson may have been learned in preparation for the new mechanism known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). Difficulties in verification of protection of tropic forests are anticipated and the slogan “getting ready for REDD” is the euphemism for capacity building.

Honduran farmer © Food First / Institute for Food and Development Policy

The challenge of adaptation to climate change will test the multi-layered nature of capacity building, especially in agriculture. Governments lack capacity to create science-based national food security strategies; NGOs need help in understanding the risks posed by climate change at community level whilst the farmers themselves lack the financial capacity to adapt, for example by investment in new seed varieties. The term “adaptive capacity” has entered the language of the fight against climate change.
Capacity Building through Technology

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.

Learning about Living training in Bauchi, Nigeria © Adam Groves

For NGOs, strategic use of the internet can strengthen campaigning and fundraising, for example through the use of global online volunteers. 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 and e-learning tools have also increased their outreach within developing countries. The provision of local language content in these initiatives becomes a vital component to complete the circle of capacity building.

New mobile phone technologies threaten to eclipse even this catalogue of achievements. 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.

Help us to complete OneWorld Guides
Many important development issues are missing from our range of Guides. OneWorld wants to fill these gaps as part of our efforts to improve understanding of the issues faced by developing countries. We receive no funding for the production of our educational resources. Every small contribution helps!

Copy this html code into your website or blog


to display this image link