Capacity-building and the Civil Society Sector in Developing Countries

A country’s path to sustainable poverty reduction and economic development depends on all actors: civil society, the private sector, and government. Therefore, it is important for donors to consider capacity-building broadly, not as narrowly confined to government.

Donors can work with civil society groups to build capacity in three key areas: (1) skills to participate along with the government in setting national development priorities; (2) skills in program implementation; and (3) skills in conducting monitoring and evaluation to verify that government is managing donor resources responsibly.

Countries that participate in Feed the Future will be expected to bring government together with civil society to set the top priorities for U.S. funding. Meaningful engagement with civil society requires talking with the right groups, including those in rural areas. Rural perspectives are critical because it is rural residents who best understand the nuances of actual rural conditions.

Building the capacity of civil society to participate in consultations may be as simple as providing travel allowances. During testimony before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the U.S. House of Representatives, Eveline Nassuna, Uganda country director for Lutheran World Relief, highlighted transportation as one of the barriers to consultation. “In most cases, government cannot do this by email, or even by phone,” she said. “Government officials must meet in person with small farmers and civil society groups and [allow] adequate time for meaningful consultation. Very literally, this means government officials making trips, or supporting the travel of small farmers and civil society groups to hold consultations.”¹

Capacity-building at the grassroots often includes helping civil society groups organize and begin their work. Since women do most of the farm labor in the developing world, for example, capacity-building would include helping them set up farmer organizations. When small farmers organize into groups, they can quickly achieve economies of scale, making it easier to obtain credit at reasonable terms and take advantage of extension services. Once organized, the organizations may need continued support as their activities become more complex. For example, a farmer organization seeking to break into larger regional and international markets may need training in business management, linking into value chains, and/or meeting agro-processing standards.²

Young children at school in Ghana. Read about Ghana’s school feeding program in Chapter 1, starting on page 36.

In a survey of 108 women’s civil society groups in nine developing countries, Women Thrive Worldwide found that the groups had a largely positive impression of U.S. foreign assistance programs but were disappointed that the design and implementation of programs excluded local input or ownership.³ Feed the Future plans to experiment with reforms in U.S. government purchasing and contracting regulations that would make it possible to contract with local groups, opening up new opportunities to take capacity-building to grassroots levels.

Civil society is responsible for ensuring that government responds to the needs of vulnerable and excluded groups. Citizens, including poor citizens, whether they speak for themselves or through civil society groups, already know that it is important to hold their government accountable. What they need is the capacity to do so. Donors can use networking technology to assist the civil society sector, largely decentralized in most developing countries, in monitoring and evaluating development programs. For example, information about aid disbursements can be posted on the Internet as the MCC does. Donors can ensure that civil society groups know how much aid is being channeled through government, which ministries are receiving it, how the aid is being used, and so forth. For civil society organizations in remote areas, electricity, computers, and Internet may be difficult or impossible to access. Getting information is an enormous challenge for them, but once the information is available on the Internet, the print media, radio, and local networks can start to distribute it. An ongoing series of consultation meetings, especially in the monitoring and evaluation phase, is very important so that remote rural organizations can communicate their own information and recommendations to program managers.

Ghana’s school feeding program, discussed in Chapter 1, is one of the most ambitious anti-hunger programs launched by the national government of a developing country. Lawrencia Wright-Adams, head of the Ghana Research and Advocacy Programme, argues that building the capacity of civil society to monitor and evaluate the national school feeding program is the only way to ensure that the program meets the goals of serving nutritious meals to the children and sourcing food from local small farmers. In district after district, she explained, no one currently has the tools to do this analysis.⁴ Moreover, there are no national nutrition guidelines for the school feeding program.⁵ According to a 2010 study of a handful of districts in the program, the cooks in 22 percent of the schools had no formal training in nutrition and hygiene, while 70 percent of the schools had no training in the maintenance of water and sanitation facilities.⁶ Identifying such weaknesses and developing recommendations to overcome them are clearly important tasks, but local people need training and support to learn how to do this.

Building the capacity of civil society groups is critical to the sustainability of Feed the Future investments. It’s important to remember that civil society organizations are accountable to poor people in their own country and should not lose this focus by putting too much emphasis on what donors want.

Issues