By ‘de-tooling’ interactions, focusing on intentions and reflecting on their behaviour and its outcomes, facilitators can strengthen their own capacities to help communities address the many challenges they face.

The success of relationships between donors and recipients depends partly on the behaviour and the skills of those who work and negotiate with both sides – the ‘boundary spanners’.

In November 2009, the East African Support Unit for NGOs (EASUN) and PSO, an association of Dutch NGOs, organised a conference in Moshi, Tanzania, that brought together 36 NGOs from the North and the South.

Values and ideas about appropriate behaviour have become part of the organisational culture at the Community Development Resource Association. But living up to these standards is a constant challenge.

Effective relationships are key to capacity building. AusAID’s ‘Making a Difference’ training programme is helping advisers and counterparts to improve their working relationships by reflecting on their behaviour and attitudes.

Building trust between facilitators and learners is essential in capacity development. Leng Chhay, a CD practitioner with many years of experience in Cambodia, looks at how this trust can be established.

‘Do no harm’ is a guiding principle in many professional disciplines. Yet although development practitioners routinely intervene in other people’s lives, this principle has not become one of the lodestars of development. Much of what is done in the name of development is predicated on some unexamined core assumptions, one of which is that good intentions automatically lead to beneficial results.

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