Most LCDs supporting civil society are still NGOs themselves and, despite attempts at some cost recovery through fees for services, most in least developed countries are still dependent on external grant funding. Most formal centres of further education are still geared to other priorities (vocational, academic or state-led). In time, experience may show that tax-based funding and a higher proportion of fees for services will replace external grants, but this is still in the future.

More than ten years ago, INTRAC hosted a meeting of what we then called ‘NGO support organisations’. We still maintain a list of such organisations on our website because we believe it is their ability to offer support services – primarily capacity building – that we should all be working towards.

Evidence suggests, however, that interest in supporting such groups is weaker than it was. In several developing countries, LCDs are reporting difficulties in obtaining funding and many are cutting their budgets and activities, sometimes quite severely, even in the poorest countries. Many have been obliged to become subcontractors to foreign consultancy firms, international NGOs and official donors rather than to prioritise building local capacity. In essence, they have been absorbed into the international aid business.

Why is this happening? First, self-interest among capacity building providers in northern countries, personnel sending agencies, international NGOs and universities can undermine the goals of strong LCDs. Second, the obsession of donors for short-term outcomes and results (exacerbated by the focus on the Millennium Development Goals) forces them away from long-term investments in capacity building, since they are harder to sell to their own domestic constituencies.

Strengthen LCDs

In Europe, we need a more honest debate: are we really doing our best to support LCDs or are we preserving our own institutions? Some bilateral aid is still linked to domestic universities and organisations and is thinly disguised tied aid. Despite the principles agreed in the 2005 Paris Declaration, many European organisations survive on contacts with and contracts from their own governments. Others no longer seem committed to reaching the goal of ‘working their way out of a job’, which ostensibly inspired many NGOs in the 1980s.

Rather than working to five-year strategic plans, organisations are assuming an indefinite future! Some agencies are still sending people abroad whose real costs would keep a mediumsized local NGO going for a year.

We must also reverse the trend towards a simplistic results-based approach that undervalues building local capacity. Behind this short-term view is an implicit belief that development consists only of economic growth in the private sector, and therefore what we know as development assistance is regarded as little more than marginal contributions to social welfare. This, so the logic goes, means that there is little understanding, belief or need to develop local institutional capacity except for technical skills.

Based on the assumption that economic growth will ‘trickle down’ to poor people and communities and that the marketplace will provide the necessary skills for the economy, organisational and institutional capacity development is no longer in fashion. Neither are programmes to build local agency or empowerment at community levels.

The answer lies in strengthening the capacity of people and their communities to solve their own problems and tackle sociopolitical inequalities, alongside a commitment to sustainable capacity building, which includes reinforcing local competencies and organisational skills. We need to renew interest in and prioritise LCDs in the widest sense, alongside an understanding that this kind of work takes time, but ultimately pays real dividends, if done well.

Further reading

• Lipson, B. and Hunt, M. (2008) Capacity Building Framework: A Values Based Guide. INTRAC.

• James, R. and Hailey, J. (2007) Capacity Building for NGOs: Making it Work. INTRAC.