"Capacity building is NOT about a training workshop. Building real capacity can be achieved when a combination of methods is used including supporting the practitioner within the organisation. This community based research project focussed on listening and learning from community practitioners, on what they are already doing well and their capacity needs."

Project Introduction

Sometimes in seeing the uniquely constructed wheel of community-lead development efforts, government and well meaning development agencies recognise the potential for growth and roll-out - and seek to grease that wheel. In a genuine but, overzealous attempt at moulding and getting it to fit a common standard, instead of greasing that wheel they put a brick in front of it. Taking the opportunity and making the effort to listen to and learn from community organisations highlights a particular brand of ‘learning’, with its own cultural nuances. This deserves respect and nurturing, not a make-over.

"We have been dilettantes and amateurs
With some of our greatest notions
For human betterment.
We have been like spoilt children:
We have been like tyrannical children;
Demanding proof when listening is required"
Ben Okri
(From: Mental Fight)

This project seeks to listen to and learn from community based organisations. It is about developing a set of relevant competence standards based on what exists in the community, to be truly developmental, not just paying lip service to ’bottom up’ development, but to demonstrate it in all its messy detail, because it has not been done before. We hope that this learning experience may make a valuable contribution to capacity development and support community based organisations grappling with the HIV/AIDS pandemic and enhance civil society as a whole.

Motivation for this project

At present, training and capacity-building in development practice and management is delivered through a fragmented and largely donor-driven model of short skills workshops that do not build competence in any deep or sustained manner, do not allow for any kind of authentic assessment or validation of competence, and do not enable coherent learning or career pathways in the field. As a result, work in this field is under-valued and unrecognised by individuals, by employers in the sector and by society at large.
Full competence in the field of Development Practice and Management requires technical management skills and knowledge as well as the ‘process’ competencies to facilitate developmental social processes in communities within a value system that promotes social justice and democratic participation of citizens.

Action

We believe that the pressure to ‘deliver’ training has meant that the short-term ‘quick-fix’ approaches have dominated to the exclusion of the longer term, system approaches. And that this makes the system ineffective and hugely wasteful. We believe that there will always be a need for short targeted training interventions. However, there is a much greater need for longer-term, system strategies that develop real in-depth capability in the field of Development Practice and Management that can be measured against widely accepted competency standards and validated through formal qualifications.

The National Qualifications framework (NQF) and the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) make provision for a development practice qualification for community development practitioners, but this has not been popular within the sector. The qualification only covers a small fraction of the full range of competencies required by development practitioners. They were not developed in a participatory process of application and learning. As a result the wording is often technical and imprecise – making it very difficult to use them to assess specific competencies at specific levels. Feedback received from organisations using them was that they were useful for only a part of the capacities that they were required to build.
This Development Practice project is a community research project attempting to define, develop and pilot relevant, community driven, outcomes based and transformative, capacity development standards for the CBO sector. Thus far the project has delivered:
  1. An initial research report on the CBO sector
  2. An Appreciative Inquiry process with community development practitioners working in HIV, in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. Project partners namely AIDS Foundation, Community Connections, WC-NACOSA, the AIDS Consortium and Keystone were instrumental in this process.
  3. 12 Competence areas were derived from the Appreciative Inquiry process and evolved into 23 competence standards. 9 standards at NQF level 2 and 14 at NQF level 4
  4. An interviewing process with 50 individual development practitioners was conducted to verify the competence standards and inspire the learning materials.

 

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Project Partners





The Sustainability Institute