5 Supporting Capacity Strengthening Strategically PDF

**5. Supporting CAPACITY STRENGTHENING STRATEGICALLY** As a funder you may have influenced the partner's **motive** for change simply by asking good questions. Your questions about safeguarding or strategy may have helped put these issues on the partner's agenda. You may have also influenced the **...

**5. Supporting CAPACITY STRENGTHENING STRATEGICALLY** As a funder you may have influenced the partner's **motive** for change simply by asking good questions. Your questions about safeguarding or strategy may have helped put these issues on the partner's agenda. You may have also influenced the **means** for change by helping the partner think through the change process, prioritise their needs and create a scope of work or capacity strengthening plan. This video looks at how funders can go further to support the **opportunity** for change. We will explore: - Four practical ways funders can help support the opportunity to change - The key questions to answer in developing a coherent, capacity strengthening strategy. - The importance of aligning programme grant making with capacity strengthening. We'll look briefly at the importance of core support, taking the true costs of operating into account and the value of a longer term, multi-year perspective. **How can funders support the opportunity to change?** Funders have a number of options in supporting partners with the opportunity to change. These include: 1. **Providing access to capacity strengthening services** As a funder you are likely to have the opportunity to resource capacity strengthening opportunities. It may be that you signpost to or even provide capacity strengthening inputs. Some funders run training programmes for partners - often in compliance-related topics or how to manage their grants better, though sometimes in issues such as resource mobilisation, communications, and leadership. 2. **Enabling partners to purchase capacity strengthening services** To promote partner ownership of the change process, it's even better if the funder can provide resources for the partner to pay for capacity strengthening services themselves - through their own core or programmatic funds. Some grant makers have a capacity strengthening funding window that grantees can apply to. However it's done, paying for the services themselves gives partners greater ownership and control over decisions. 3. **Monitor and learn, with patience** Funders can support the opportunity for change by paying attention to the process but without interfering. Any change process needs follow-through. Change is a gradual process, more like a drip-drip evolution, than an instant, revolutionary change. As one consultant described it to me: *"Change is not parachuting in a consultant for two days. It takes more than one session to change habits of many years."* Regularly asking partners: 'How are things are going with the capacity building?' provides a gentle reminder of its importance. Funders, working with a portfolio of partners, can also support change through intentional learning about what is working in capacity strengthening and what is not. Sharing these lessons can be really valuable. But funders also need patience. Capacity strengthening does not fit arbitrary project deadlines. As the McKinsey research also found "*There are few quick fixes when it comes to building capacity, and in many cases it is unrealistic and often counterproductive for capacity builders to demand immediate results, reported quarterly*." Capacity strengthening takes time, especially as partners are still working full time implementing their mission critical programmes. Their time may be taken up by external disasters in the environment (whether natural or political). Most organisations fail to change simply because they are too busy. 4. **Collaborate with other funders** To give partners maximum opportunity to change, it helps if other funders are on the same page, incentivising the same things and not overwhelming the partner with contradictory demands. Funders can and should foster collaboration and coordination with other donors to bring convergence of efforts rather than diffuse, duplicating and, in some cases, even contradictory capacity strengthening programmes. One NGO I work closely with estimated that their leadership spends 50% of their time attending different donor capacity strengthening initiatives whether it be: strategy, risk management, safeguarding, new proposal/reporting formats, GBV, ToC -- all valuable in themselves, but places a heavy time burden on leadership. The least that funders can do is coordinate amongst themselves. **Developing a capacity strengthening strategy** **Most grant makers take quite an ad hoc, case by case approach to capacity strengthening. They rarely make clear strategic decisions about who and what they are going to focus on. In this way capacity strengthening becomes almost an afterthought -- a good, but optional extra.** **Yet as this course has demonstrated, capacity strengthening is much too important to be treated in such a random, almost care-less way. As with everything else in life, you will get out what you put in. Effective capacity strengthening takes considered thought and strategic decisions, not simply throwing resources at what has become a crisis. To shape a coherent capacity strengthening strategy and narrow down the focus, grant makers need to answer fundamental questions, which you can see on the screen and on the learning platform:** **Do not read out but scroll through** **[The changes /aim/ambition]{.smallcaps}** **The current situation: Why is capacity strengthening really an issue? What problems is the lack of capacity causing? How is this affected by wider environment?** **Your ambition: How much time, effort, money are you really prepared to invest in capacity strengthening? How much of a priority is it for your leadership?** **Your aspiration: What changes do you hope to see in partners through the capacity strengthening?** **The topics: What priority themes or topics to focus on? (e.g. holistic or in specific areas such as programme delivery only)?** **The theory of change: How do you think change happen in your grantees? What has worked well in past? What methods are therefore most likely to catalyse change in the priority topics?** **[The partners]{.smallcaps}** **The partner focus: Who will you focus on? All partners or a select few? If you do prioritise, then what criteria will you use to select them?** **[The providers]{.smallcaps}** **The capacity strengthening providers: Who are the providers, preferably in-country, who can provide this support? What do they specialise in? How much capacity to they have beyond the lead individual?** **Their organisation type: Who are these providers consultants; or member networks; or grant-making intermediaries?** **Their approach: To what extent do their ways of working align with good experiential learning practice?** **Strengthening the field: How are they learning from their practice and passing it on to others?** **Does the field of civil society support services in your focus countries need strengthening? If so, how?** **[The Performance and Impact ]{.smallcaps}** **Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning: How will you know if you and your partners are making progress? Do you plan to monitor and evaluate at individual partner level, or at portfolio level?** **[Your Own Capacity and Strengthening]{.smallcaps}** **Your role: What support to capacity strengthening will you provide? What is the best contribution you can make? (good questions and conversations; signposting to resource people; training opportunities and good documents; contracting provider for training; funding partners to purchase services themselves; strengthening the providers themselves...)** **Your Capacity: Who in your organisation will be responsible for this? Do they have the knowledge? skills? capacity? confidence? time? interest? commitment? How will you continue to sharpen your skills to support capacity strengthening effectively? How will you finance all this?** **Your Allies: Who do you need to better collaborate with to provide coordinated support to partners?** **Your Changes: What do you need to change in your grant-making systems to better align with capacity strengthening?** **If you don't currently have answers to these sorts of questions, then we'd recommend developing a simple capacity strengthening strategy for your organisation. How might you go about answering these questions in a way that builds understanding, ownership and commitment within your own organisation?** **[Aligning Funding Policies and Practices]** **This final question in that list raises the big issue of what needs to change in your own grant-making systems in order to support of your capacity strengthening. Many funders completely undermine their efforts at capacity strengthening through restrictive, short-term and burdensome grant funding processes. Partners have their time and capacity taken up by** onerous and time-consuming reporting requirements. Programme grants should encourage and even incentivise the hoped-for capacity changes, not undermine them. - **Multi-year funding** **Experience has shown that capacity strengthening takes time if we are to take it seriously. As long ago as 1982 USAID concluded that genuine capacity strengthening takes at least 10 years. So if our funding is only on an annual basis, does this encourage partners to take a more short-term perspective? Annual project funding may make partners less inclined to invest the necessary time and effort into longer term organisational change processes.** - **Core Support** Civil society organisations notoriously suffer from underinvestment in their admin functions: whether it's IT, people management, communications, financial systems, safeguarding, premises, infrastructure, equipment. The list of possible overhead or indirect costs is long. The underinvestment creates what some refer to as a 'starvation cycle'. This is defined as "a debilitating trend of under-investment in organisational infrastructure that is fed by potentially misleading financial reporting and donor expectations of increasingly low overhead expenses." One way of addressing the 'starvation cycle' is to provide core support, whereby you fund the organisation, not the specific project and you allow them to determine how best to allocate the money for maximum impact within the agreed strategy. As well as covering necessary overhead costs, core support gives partners the flexibility to invest in capacity strengthening. Many grant-makers, like Oak Foundation, are striving to increase the percentage of their grant-making that goes to Core Support. - True cost Where core funding is not deemed appropriate, covering the 'true costs' of an organisation within the project is another way of addressing the starvation cycle. True cost funding involves resourcing, not only the direct costs of projects but also a fair portion of administration, or indirect costs, including financial management, safeguarding, people management, office costs and transport. After considerable research into the true costs of operations, the MacArthur Foundation now allows their partners 29% for indirect costs. True cost funding is a way of reinforcing and not undermining capacity strengthening. So there is a lot grant makers can do, not only to cultivate motive and advise on the means for change, but also to create the opportunities to change. Grant makers can: 1. Help partners identify and then access appropriate capacity strengthing services; 2. Develop your own coherent, thought-through and well-resourced capacity strengthening strategy. 3. Regularly monitor, evaluate and learn from what's working and what's not. You can also actively collaborate with the other funders of your partners, so that partners have the time and space to change. 4. Adapt your own grant making processses so that they encourage, rather than undermine, your capacity strengthening objective. Take a moment to reflect: - In which of these four areas do you need to up your game? - What might be a helpful next step for you personally?