What's important about Capacity Building

17 Jul 2022

The capacity building effort must be owned and directed by the organization, not a funder.

Activities must be part of a theoretical and practical understanding of the nonprofit business as a whole. Not just focus on one functional area, siloed from others. The effort must be one that understands that all nonprofit business functions are interconnected. This will give the team a rationale when selecting priority areas to work on. It will also allow the team to understand how working on one area will affect others.

Tools selected for capacity building efforts are better if they are comprehensive. Especially a capacity assessment tool. All business functions must be taken into account. Tools that focus on one area usually were designed without thinking of the nonprofit business as a whole. Not a single core business function can be ignored.

Intensive, explicit, repetitive, focus on improving the organization’s capacity to achieve its mission in the long run, and not just address its current situation. It’s not used to solve situational issues, but their causes. For example, it’s not just about making sure that a nonprofit has effective leadership at the time. It’s about making sure that the nonprofit has the capacity to guarantee that it always has effective leadership. Because effective leadership is a core business function of any nonprofit.

Second, it focuses on the capacity of a nonprofit to do what it already does, when in reality, that nonprofit needs to do “different”. If the nonprofit

Capacity building needs to focus on transforming nonprofits into learning organizations, building their technology, and innovation capabilities. This would help, among many other things, to create measurable outcomes that can be aggregated into a body of evidence that would “help quantify the impact, make the case for resources for these programs internally, and build increasingly effective (…) programs”

An understanding of capacity building as a conscious effort and a set of explicit investments in ordered, practical, formalized knowledge, skills, abilities, and information that is systematically applied to make incremental and continuous changes and improvements to achieve the purpose of the organization.

Capacity building must be understood as part of a process of innovation through continued and incremental changes. To be continued, these changes must be small and accumulative. To be incremental, changes must be of high-frequency and sustained. They must also be focused on the core functions of the organization (related to its functioning as a nonprofit business), as well as on the core competencies of the organization (related to its goals and strategies). To be successful, these changes must involve the entire organization, from Board Members, to interns.

“HOW TO CHANGE”

Technology Management as a matter concerning the processes of accumulation of capacities in people (Learning Processes) that the company as an organization encourages or promotes. Technological Capabilities are important resources to improve the production of goods and services.

The company’s central technological task is to promote and facilitate learning processes for the accumulation of such capabilities.

Learning Activities

1. Research

2. Copying Best Practices

3. Testing, Experimentation and R&D

4. Evaluation of the experience

5. Training

6. Technical Assistance

7. Recruitment of Qualified Human Resources

Obstacles to the investment in capacity building need to be identified.

Is the concept of Capacity Building understood within the organization?

Is the effort valued in the organization?

Concepto y Valoración de lo Tecnológico Relación entre Estrategia de la Empresa y Aprendizaje Tecnológico Prioridades para invertir en Aprendizaje Tecnológico Valoración, Desarrollo y Beneficios de Recursos Humanos Obstáculos para invertir en Aprendizaje Tecnológico

We want nonprofits to evolve from Unaware/Passive to Reactive to Strategic to Creative. Which are increments in both the nonprofit’s degree of awareness of its capabilities and the degree the effectiveness in practice of such capabilities.

Renowned Economist and Oxford University Professor Sanjaya Lall in his highly cited article(cited by 2388) ‘Technological capabilities and industrialisation’ identifies the key determinantof an in industry’s capability advancement. His structural analysis of technological capabilitiesin developing countries identified four levels of capability progression (see Figure 1) as thesalient determinants of an industry’s capability development (Lall, 1992). These include operational capabilities as the basic level which denotes the ability to undertake manufacturing/production at the production facility making use of existing resources such as existing manpower. At the intermediate level, duplicative capabilities denotes the ability to expand technological output developing indigenous supplier industries. In the next step, adaptive capabilities mean the ability to reengineer production process. Finally, at the advanced level, an industry’s innovative capabilities enable the firms to develop next generation products/systems (Lall, 1992).

(PDF) Influence of policies in capability evolution and industry structure: Lessons from the Indian automotive industry and implications for other developing countries. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325049945_Influence_of_policies_in_capability_evolution_and_industry_structure_Lessons_from_the_Indian_automotive_industry_and_implications_for_other_developing_countries