Section 03: Guiding principles

Capacity strengthening with partners involves using our power, knowledge and experience to influencechange in partner organisations. We are accountable to them to use this power wisely and tread carefully over the delicate structures they are building.

Having some clear guiding principles helps to:

• Shape your decision making (ask “how does this fit with our principles?”)

• Re-balance the power relationship with your partners

• Remind us of the approaches which we know from experience work well

Example: In Burkina Faso, an International NGO found that involving the young board members of a youth organisation in their self-assessment process (not just the staff) massively increased their engagement and support of the process of change.

3.1: Ownership and leadership

Ownership is the single most important ingredient in ensuring change. Lasting change comes from within an organisation, even if it’s trigged by external events such as a donor pulling out or a pandemic.

Every time you a make a decision for your partner, you are eating away at their ownership of the process. Here are some examples of being helpful but risking taking away that power of finding their own way:

• Giving them an assessment tool to use without discussing the pros and cons

• Choosing consultants for them

• Facilitating an assessment process for them

• ‘Helpfully’ writing a plan for them

Each of these examples could be a helpful intervention. But in each case, there may be ways to keep the partner involved in the decision-making: e.g. by showing different tools, giving them a budget to hire a consultant themselves, supporting one or two staff to lead the facilitation… etc.

Leaders (staff and board) are there to lead the process. Often they are the ones who have to change first, and often the most useful thing you can do is listen, support them, give feedback and provide information if they ask. Encourage collaboration and involvement at all levels of the organisation.

Support partners through decision- making, instead of acting on their behalf. Ownership is a key factor in ensuring lasting change.

3.2: Getting to the heart

Get past the symptoms and the standard assessment form and get to the heart of the matter. Look below the surface: observe and talk to people. Are there power struggles holding back progress? Are there attitudes which block communication? When you are in a meeting with a partner what are the dynamics between the people in the conversation? What can you do to hold up a mirror to your partner so they can see themselves in a different way? Engage positive emotions: hope and excitement for the future. Avoid fault-finding which makes people defensive and feeling judged.

Example of fault-finding question: Why did you do that?

Better questions: What happened? , What changed?

Example: model the behaviour

UK based staff of an NGO wondered why their country staff behaved in a very bureaucratic way with partners: giving feedback in long annotated documents for example, rather than sitting down together to talk through the learning from a project report.

They realised that they were setting the example by doing exactly the same thing with country offices!

3.3: Change takes time

We are often driven by donor deadlines for reporting results, or our own deadlines to get a project ‘done’. Real change takes years:

• Small organisations have to squeeze capacity strengthening in as well as their doing their work in communities

• Volunteers don’t have as much time to spend on meetings

• It takes time for people to get used to doing things differently

• Emergencies or crises can throw timetables out of the window

3.4: Learning is by doing, not by training!

Training is often seen as the same thing as capacity strengthening. It really is not!

Would you have confidence in a doctor who has passed all her exams, but never actually seen a patient?!

Quote from NGO staff

"I’ve been on lots of training on gender – so I don’t understand why I’m getting feedback that my colleagues don’t see me putting it into practice. I know all about this equality stuff!"

Training is one tool among many to enable people to learn and change. It shouldn’t even be the first one we think of. We’ll say more in section 6.4 about when it could be useful and how to make training more effective.

Other ways to learn include:

• Learning from others (how many of you have sat next to someone on a computer while they showed you how to do something?)

• Having a go at something new and reflecting on what went well and what you’d do differently

• Having someone coach you, asking questions to get you to think of solutions for yourself – after all you know your situation better than anyone.

More about this in Section 6.

3.5: Capacity Strengthening Myths

Myth No 1: We can control and predict another’s change

The aid system assumes that we can manage others’ development. Aid agencies set up more and more procedures to manage change and be accountable to donors. In the process they often strangle innovation and community-led development.

Luckily as smaller organisations you may be able to avoid this trap! You cannot control another organisation, only do your best to support helpful change.

Myth No 2: Organisations operate like logical machines

We can’t assume that if we do ‘x’ then add a bit of ‘y‘ the result will definitely be ‘z’. Example: if we send 20 people on gender training, and put in some equality in recruitment guidelines, then the organisation will be a model of equal opportunities.

We know the reality is more complex but we often behave as though we can ignore the reality, and the result will be ‘good enough’.

A story

A northern-based INGO was struggling to adapt their reporting format to make it more appropriate for the youth-led organisations they wanted to work with.

One of their finance staff pointed out that the youth groups they worked with in West Africa often had their own formats they were used to working with and which actually worked well.

The finance person suggested the head office could just adopt the format the youth groups were already using. This idea was laughed at by her colleagues. What?! Use their format?! It’s not the way things are done.