NGO Capacity Building – Key Concepts
NGO Capacity Building – Key Concepts
NGO Capacity Building: Key Concepts
Q. What is capacity building?
A. At its core, capacity building is a participatory process which seeks to improve a nongovernmental
organization’s (NGO) ability to accomplish its mission. It takes into account
the quality of the NGO’s performance, the achievement of concrete results over
time and the responsible use of scarce resources. While there is general agreement among
international development practitioners that capacity building is necessary to foster the
growth and maturity of NGOs, exactly what it entails is subject to many interpretations.
According to La Fond and Brown’s article, A Guide to Monitoring and Evaluation of
Capacity-Building Interventions in the Health Sector of Developing Countries:
• Capacity is the “stock of resources available to an organization as well as the actions
that transform these resources into performance”,
• Capacity building is “a process that improves the ability of an organization to meet
objectives and perform better”.
• Performance is “the set of results that represent productivity and competence related
to an established objective.”.1