Forty percent of development assistance is devoted to capacity building, yet results and impact are still in question and measurement tools are imprecise.
Training, knowledge exchange and other learning activities for capacity development must be catalytic and transformational in helping country partners deliver results.
Capacity building efforts should focus on results identified by local leaders.
One-off donor-led training must give way to integrated models of south-south and triangular exchanges, sustained learning support, and scaled-up local delivery through national and regional institutions.
Getting More Bang for the Buck
“The need for capacity development is enormous,” said Gudrun Kochendorfer-Lucius, World Bank Institute (WBI) Director for Capacity Development and Partnerships, addressing 71 experts from 30 multilateral and bilateral capacity building institutions. “More than $20 billion a year is spent on products and activities to build capacity for development. This is 40 percent of total official development assistance,” she said.
Kochendorfer-Lucius made the comments at a forum for leaders of development training institutes at the World Bank on June 17-19, 2009. The experts agreed that traditional training courses should be replaced by other forms of knowledge exchange and peer learning that are strategically tied to development effectiveness. This poses new challenges for defining, gathering, and reporting results.
If capacity building accounts for 40 percent of development assistance, said one participant, then we are best placed to influence the discussion and, together, bring best practices to the table. But what models and experience can lead to better results?
Breaking the Supply Syndrome: You’ve Got to Own It
Creation of an online community on results management
Current practices are not working and there is not enough consultation with the countries, was the consensus view in an early morning videoconference that connected forum participants in Washington with 78 practitioners in Ghana, Ethiopia and Uganda, representing 40 African institutions. The message was clear: Donor-funded programs and course content does not take account of local needs and conditions. The conclusion: something is getting lost in translation during client consultations. Are both sides complicit in creating, providing, and accepting bad solutions?
“You cannot do capacity development for others,” said Thomas Theisohn from the Learning Network on Capacity Development. “Learning is voluntary and capacity development must be home-grown so we need to move from supply to demand, from delivery to acquisition.” And interventions need to be sustained by a process of long-term support aimed at organizational change and not solely individual skills-building.
If the fit is wrong then what kind of learning support will make a difference? Experts agree that current large-scale prepackaged training programs will be replaced by more flexible approaches that provide solutions on demand - a kind of “capacity hotline,” or just-in-time exchanges that home in on well-defined problems.
Capacity development is more than training. It is about facilitating change within complex systems and institutional environments that often get in the way of results. Systemic change will require the creation of “knowledge hubs” in local and regional learning institutes, universities, or government agencies. They should provide mentoring, online learning, alumni networks, and other forms of knowledge exchange.
The community of practice offers podcasts and resources from the forum, as well as open discussions on results management
Colin Bruce, Director of Strategy and Operations for the World Bank Africa Region, kicked off a panel discussion on the results of learning by describing a clear and present operational need for capacity building in a middle-income country that had defaulted on a loan and was facing a macroeconomic disaster. Data revealed, among other shortcomings, that some ministry of finance staff could not read a balance sheet. Several practical things needed to happen quickly to meet very specific and immediate needs: defining a problem that could be solved by training, identifying the competent providers, and implementing the program quickly and defining results that could be achieved. All this had to take place in a “multi-layered” environment of discussion and disagreement, and administrative approval processes.
New Approaches and Instruments
The global mandate to build capacity for development cannot be achieved by any single organization. Success will require both strong local leadership and a critical mass: large numbers as well as pivotal actors.
“WBI’s new strategy is to become a ‘global facilitator of knowledge and learning,'" said WBI’s VP Sanjay Pradhan. “We need to identify and share innovative approaches to learning and build leadership skills as well as the capacity of non-state actors to support accountability.” Together, said Pradhan, learning institutes can scale up capacity development by pooling global best practice and building the capacity of local institutions to build capacity on their own - even become centers of excellence.
The Administrative Staff College of India provided one example of a well-integrated program. In India, sixty-five percent of GDP comes from the urban sector, which accounts for 28 percent of the population. Yet with migration to the cities on the rise, urban poverty is increasing. Productivity of India’s 5,000 urban systems must improve in delivering services such as water supply and sanitation and public health. In response the National Urban Renewal Program calls for an integrated scaling up of policy, knowledge management, and skills training. The program includes certification and post-training knowledge support including group mentoring, virtual professional networks, and shared project reports.
Evaluating Impact: How Do We Know When We Get There?
Evaluation is often limited to measuring individual learning gains, as reported in participant satisfaction surveys. But learning organizations are looking for a common set of measures or proxies for capacity development. How can learning be linked to institutional outcomes and development results?
“We know that beneficiaries work in key agencies and as policy analysts, planners, and economists, but there is no systematic way of linking the learning with results or outcomes,” said one participant. Anecdotal evidence is gathered from alumni networks and chance meetings and sometimes from tracer studies.
“At WBI, changing the rules of the game has led to real measurement challenges,” says Samuel Otoo, principal author of WBI’s Capacity Development Results Framework (CDRF). “The CDRF provides a way of defining the changes we want to achieve and clarifying how the capacity development intervention contributes to that change. The framework has been long in development,” adds Otoo. “But this needs to be an operational exercise. Now we need to road test it.”
This approach helps build ownership because the exercise is linked to a specific development goal, and involves stakeholders in discussing local constraints and incentives. Ownership means country-led projects and services that clients really want and that contribute to country capacity.
“The CDRF puts some discipline around a topic that is elusive and suggests that learning and capacity development need to be connected within a theory of change,” says Nadim Matta, one of the facilitators and president of the Rapid Results Institute.
The Hundred Day Challenge
Bringing together capacity development practitioners to improve results management
Wrapping up the event, facilitator and participant Nadim Matta urged participants to collaborate in finding new ways of doing business, quoting Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity as, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Participants committed to rapid results, developing, over the next 100 days, tools, checklists, action plans, joint research projects, and partnerships, starting with realistic, concrete, and specific projects. They also recognized that the shifts away from traditional models would require large resources, and as one group queried: What will we do with the classrooms?
WBI’s Capacity Development Results Framework helps ensure a systematic and strategic approach to defining and measuring results of capacity development initiatives that are designed to contribute to aid effectiveness. It bridges the gap often found between broader development objectives and specific learning activities.
The framework provides tools that can be applied at every stage of the capacity building cycle from needs assessment, to strategy formulation, program design, monitoring of program implementation, adaptive management, assessment, and communication of results.
The CDRF helps identify specific institutional and policy-related factors in a given environment that impede the achievement of development goals; and supports the design of locally owned interventions that directly address these factors.
The framework provides standard sets of indicators that can be applied across countries and sectors to assess results and facilitate comparison of programs. The framework has been used to evaluate seven Bank and eight non-Bank projects in public financial management, trade and customs, health systems, road transport and regulatory reform. WBI will use the framework to guide capacity assessments and decisions about its capacity development programs, and to manage and measure their results.
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