The case for local capacity developers

29 October 2010

In this issue of Capacity.org we focus on local capacity developers (LCDs) who ‘own’ this expertise. LCDs facilitate change, explore new ways of working and help enhance capacity, knowing what long-term development requires. This expertise is usually found among local consultants and NGOs, and in higher education and research institutes.

Many countries are short of LCDs and depend heavily on foreign experts. While this may be a valid way to acquire knowledge without having to invest in its development, there are also several pitfalls:

• Foreign expertise is expensive and often hard to find, which reduces the ability of a society to apply, maintain and develop solutions acquired from elsewhere.

• Foreign ‘experts’ often transfer knowledge and propose solutions that do not work because they have not been adapted to local realities or are not well grounded in the local context.

Capacity development involves building on local knowledge and, only where necessary and appropriate, bringing in foreign knowledge to create know-how and solutions that are state-of-the art and context specific. This requires a critical mass of LCDs.

LCD support is an emerging sector and little is known about it. Jan Ubels, in the feature article, makes the case for more in-depth study and analysis. As a first step, SNV, supported by the UK Overseas Development Institute, conducted exploratory studies in Cameroon, Montenegro, Peru, Tanzania and Vietnam. Clearly, the need for high-quality capacity development services is growing.

At the sub-national level, however, due to limited resources, this need for high-quality services does not translate into demand. In terms of outreach and quality there is certainly room for improvement. Local capacity developers could improve their services enormously but the conditions in which they operate can be tough.

To find out what drives local capacity developers and the challenges they face, Capacity.org interviewed three LCDs from Benin, Tanzania and Vietnam. They suggest ways in which donors and national governments can help create a more enabling environment in which LCDs can grow.

What determines whether or not a country has a strong network of local capacity developers? Policies that support tertiary education are crucial. Damtew Teferra explains the challenges facing African universities and the strategic choices they need to make. In the 1980s and 1990s African governments were wrongly advised by – yes – foreign experts, notably the World Bank, that higher education was a luxury developing countries could not afford and that it would be better to send their students abroad for higher education. This advice was based on calculations showing that the rate of return on investments in tertiary education was much lower than those in primary or secondary education. Although the data and assumptions underlying these calculations were flawed, the Word Bank’s education agenda remained unchanged for decades, contributing to the collapse of the university sector in Africa. In turn, this meant that African countries lacked the capacity to generate their own experts.

Today, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have new policies and are investing heavily in higher education. Even the World Bank – in the book Accelerating Catch-up: Tertiary Education for Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (2009) – has changed its views. It will be a challenge, however, for Africa to catch up with India, for example. Having invested in higher education for decades, India is now benefiting from a wealth of home-grown talent.

Guest columnist Brian Pratt focuses on another factor that both causes and perpetuates over-dependency on foreign expertise, the aid sector itself. Many subsidised aid organisations provide capacity development services by bringing in foreign expertise, thereby preventing the emergence of a local sector of capacity builders or even crowding out LCDs already operating in the market.

In a special article, and in anticipation of a global event, ‘Capacity is Development’, planned by UNDP in early 2010, Thomas Theisohn and Tony Land provide an overview of the capacity development knowledge architecture, which can be seen as comprising multiple communities of practice. Some of these openly link to capacity development, whereas others, without explicitly embracing capacity development concepts, generate relevant ideas and data. The authors argue that connecting these various communities of practice could trigger a rich cross-fertilisation of ideas and practices.