In Acord Newsletter Issue 2: June 2001

Return to Contents page

Article 3:

Building capacity at grassroots level: a strategic approach

From a report by Alex Shankland

Much of the capacity-building work under-taken by ACORD programmes focuses on the practical needs of participants such as learning to manage a tree nursery or making fuel-saving stoves. Yet ACORD's mission to support people’s efforts to overcome poverty and marginalisation also requires it to ensure that its capacity-building work helps people to pursue their strategic interests argues Shankland in a recent report on ACORD's capacity building work. These include protecting their land rights, demanding more accountability in the management of local services or ensuring greater gender equality in the control of resources.

Balancing practical with strategic
To develop a set of guidelines and principles on capacity building, one should try to strike a balance between "practical" and "strategic" capacity-building. This, the report suggests, is where ACORD’s comparative advantage lies since its approach enables it to link its work with different actors at different levels to tackle the both the consequences and the causes of poverty and marginalisation. Developing a more systematic understanding of good practice in grassroots capacity-building requires adopting a flexible approach which embraces diversity and complexity with a flexible approach with a consistent set of principles which are coherent with ACORD’s values, as well as following some basic guidelines on what constitutes good practice.

This is a significant report in that while there is a lot of literature on capacity-building with higher-level government agencies and established Southern NGOs, very little has been published on work with community-based organisations (CBOs) and other local actors such as village or neighbourhood governance structures, local service providers and individual community members who are the focus of most of ACORD's capacity-building work.

What exactly are CBOs?
ACORD has a strong record of capacity-building work with so-called "apex organisations" (networks or federations of grassroots groups), such as the iddir networks in Ethiopia and the peasant unions in Burkina Faso and has considerable experience of "capacity-building through partnership" with major Southern NGOs such as ADRA in Angola and AMDU in Mozambique. However, the vast majority of ACORD’s capacity-building efforts focus on a wide range of "community-based organisations" - on people and groups who work at the local "grassroots" level pursuing a mass of different objectives. Some are traditional or "informal" structures; others are interest or activity groups rather than "CBOs" in the conventional sense. Some have a "governance" role, deciding on the use of community's resources. CBOs may also include people who receive training in groups but who work individually, whether in public or in private service provision. The range of CBOs with whom ACORD works in Southern Africa include local governance and specific community governance groups, income generating to public or private service provision groups, social assistance to change agent groups.

Choosing whose capacity to build
The strategic approach highlights the need to develop a clear and consistent set of criteria to choose whose capacity to build. This, the report suggests, is best achieved by listening to different groups of local people and building up an understanding of their needs and interests at three levels: the individual level (such as acquiring literacy or increasing gender awareness), at the group level (such as ensuring that group resources are managed transparently and that leadership is democratic and inclusive) and at the level of the group’s relations with the outside world (such as bringing goods to market or defending land rights in negotiations with the government). The approach suggests a nine-step process from identifying existing social and interest groups through participatory research to negotiating the capacity-building plan with the communities and groups concerned.

Developing a strategic group capacity-building plan
If participants conclude that the strengthening of an existing group structure or the development of a new one is the best way to meet their needs and pursue their interests, organisations should work with them to develop a group capacity-building plan.

This process should start from a clear understanding of the group's and the members' objectives and analyses of what capacities they need at all three levels and which actors and structures they have to deal with to pursue their objectives. Once these have been identified, they should be developed with group members, based on their desired objectives and their priorities for the three levels. A realistic assessment of how much time and what other resources both they and the team will be able to commit to the process, to avoid creating unrealistic expectations, should also be taken into consideration.

The plan should also allow for an ongoing process of reflection and review, as the needs and interests of a group and its members change over time. These steps are clearly outlined in the report.

Getting the methodology right
Promoting learning, according to this approach, requires much more than talking at people. A good capacity-building strategy should strike a balance between "learning by hearing", "learning by seeing" and "learning by doing", and between theory and practice. This means ensuring that oral explanation, visual demonstration and practical application are deployed in a mutually reinforcing way, and that information is provided as part of a process which stimulates people’s own reflection and analysis.

The report provides some examples of how this can be done, drawing on the experience of ACORD’s programmes in Southern Africa. Good practice in promoting "learning by hearing" includes using simple language and encouraging debate, while bad practice is using jargon and lecturing. Good practice in "learning by seeing " includes using visual resources with non-literate people, while bad practice is overloading people with unnecessary images. Good practice in "learning by doing" includes letting people make decisions, while bad practice is unsupported implementation

Some important guiding principles include: knowing your audience, which to helps to ensure that the choice of language, examples and visual materials is accessible and appropriate; knowing the level of literacy of group members so as to be able to decide on the mix of written and visual materials; used and discovering people’s existing skills, knowledge and resources and building on these, rather than assuming that participants are starting from scratch; respond to emerging demands rather than sticking rigidly to a predetermined curriculum. Though this may lead the team into areas where they lack technical expertise, they can often rely on alliances with other agencies and links with outside specialists to facilitate training that they cannot deliver themselves. Accompaniment, where formal training events are linked to regular follow-up, and ad hoc support is provided in response to specific demands is also useful.

Finally, enabling individuals and groups to undertake new activities for themselves can ensure that "learning by doing" plays its part in the capacity-building process. More than this, however, it can promote the sense of empowerment which is one of the most important objectives of ACORD’s work with vulnerable and marginalised groups.

Practical and strategic capacity-building
Capacity-building programmes should ensure that right from the outset, work on developing people’s practical skills is integrated with activities which encourage critical reflection on the issues which affect their strategic interests. It is tempting to treat practical and strategic capacity building as separate, yet in the reality of people’s lives, there is often no such separation. If the members of a women’s agriculture group are obtaining poor returns from their hard work, it may not be because they are using inadequate technology, but because men’s control of land allocation means that they can only obtain plots on short-term loan, which obliges them to plant low-value short-cycle crops.

It also means that if strategic issues (such as control of resources) emerge in discussions during the course of practical skills training, the team should resist the temptation to disregard these issues because they are "too political" or "not relevant to the practical questions in hand". Often, practical training events will offer a "neutral space" for such issues to be raised in a way that would not otherwise be possible. Some groups, such as women or younger men, may be reluctant to speak out in public spaces such as community meetings, and may value the opportunity to express themselves in a less formal setting.

When capacity-building work builds from the practical to the strategic in this way, taking the lead from issues identified by participants themselves, it is more likely that there will be a strong sense of ownership of the process. There will also be less scope for other local actors, who may feel that addressing "difficult" or "political" issues threatens their interests, to sabotage the process by claiming that agendas have been imposed by outsiders rather than identified by community members themselves.

Conversely, capacity-building activities which start by focusing on strategic issues (for example through participatory analysis of local power structures or gender relations), should identify links to practical needs and the capacity-building support which can help to address them. One example might be a gender analysis which revealed that women are not chosen to represent the community in contacts with officials, and that the reason given for this is that low literacy levels prevent them from understanding official documents. In this situation, a literacy programme could help women to meet practical needs at the same time as challenging a barrier that limits their access to positions of power.

Above all, strategic capacity-building should develop not only participants’ ability to think critically about strategic issues (both within the group and in the wider society), but also their ability to act strategically – that is, to operate in ways which advance their longer-term interests as well as helping to meet their immediate needs. Key elements here are planning and alliance-building.

A strategic approach to planning should help to ensure that activities and resources are focused on achieving the changes which the group has identified as most important, rather than being dispersed among a mass of unconnected short-term objectives. A strategic approach to alliance-building should help to ensure that other actors and groups who can contribute to bringing about the desired changes are identified and that relationships are developed with them, allowing participants to escape the disempowering effects of isolation.

The report concludes that for ACORD to make the most of its potential comparative advantage in balancing practical and strategic grassroots capacity building and linking this to broader civil society development and advocacy work, it would need a major organisational commitment to building on and rolling out existing good practice. It would need to significantly invest in building its own capacity for capacity-building; building staff skills across its programmes, both through horizontal sharing and through targeted training and support.

Return to Contents page

Return to top