By: Sachin Gupta, a member of the Civil Society Development Team, at the International HIV/AIDS Alliance
Capacity building for rapid scale-up
Unless capacity building is co-ordinated with needs assessments, funding and project cycle management, it can be a real waste of time: Given, rather than asked for, at the wrong time, to the wrong people on the wrong skill-sets. The International HIV/AIDS Alliance has developed a practical toolkit to help design, deliver and evaluate targeted capacity building. Copies of the NGO Capacity Analysis toolkit are freely available for order at www.aidsalliance.org.
In many fields, such as public health or emergencies, working through community organisations is one of the most effective and sustainable ways of reaching people at risk. The ability to act rapidly to respond to the scale of an epidemic or emergency is also vital. In these situations, capacity building is a necessary complement to rapid scale-up, but without careful co-ordination, it can lead to disappointing results.
For most community organisations, typically over-stretched and under-funded, the priority is, almost pathologically, on getting their hands on more funding. Money will be needed to plug gaps in activities, to fund additional essential services, or to scale up activities. Scaling up may be needed to expand coverage to people or locations not yet reached, to provide additional services, or complementary ones through combining multi-sectoral approaches.
While most donors and programme designers are often looking for just such opportunities to fund scale-up, how often do we hear complaints about the lack of absorptive capacity? So, capacity building programmes are set up, but all too often delivered to a wide, unspecified audience in general skills such as resource mobilisation or organisational development. ‘Recipients’ of this capacity building are left interested, at best inspired, but with little idea of what to prioritise or what they are building capacity for.
The solution is to co-ordinate funding and capacity building in sequenced steps.
Once a community group has been engaged in funded project cycle work, the door is opened to a range of opportunities for targeted capacity building. It is at this stage that staff and volunteers will have thought about what the community needs from them, what they already know how to do and what they might struggle to deliver through lack of skills or resources. Organisations then become eager consumers of knowledge and training and can play an active role in deciding and prioritising their capacity building needs.
This is when an analysis of current capacity can be of greatest value – to identify weaknesses in the context of activities to be delivered. Within this context, a wider range of capacities become relevant. A recent study of almost 700 community faith-based organisations in east and southern Africa 1 found that financial and organisational capacities – areas in which training is most commonly offered - were actually already quite strong. What was really needed was technical training on programmatic methods and approaches.
A capacity building programme for these organisations would need to analyse the technical aspects of activities being undertaken and the gaps they were struggling with. Without this, only general organisational capacity building would be possible which, in most cases, would be of little added value.
The International HIV/AIDS Alliance has recently developed a package of tools to help conduct joint assessments of capacity building needs with community organisations. These tools use a variety of methods to look at different capacities including technical skills, networking, partnerships, referrals, advocacy, and participation of affected communities as well as organisational strengths. They combine training and assessment methods to encourage organisations to develop an informed view of their capacity building needs. We also use them to evaluate baseline levels of capacity to enable us to measure outcomes and improvements in capacity and how these relate to overall programme impact.
The new NGO Capacity Analysis toolkit might be useful for capacity builders, facilitators and leaders of community organisations. It is freely available (including postage anywhere in the world) and can be ordered from the website www.aidsalliance.org.
Sachin Gupta is a member of the Civil Society Development Team, at the International HIV/AIDS Alliance. He provides technical support and policy advice on organisational and institutional development to the Alliance’s programmes in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. He has previously worked as a management and organisational development consultant. He can be contacted at sgupta@aidsalliance.org
1) Study of the response by faith-based organisations to orphans and vulnerable children, WCRP & UNICEF, G Foster, 2003 |