Donors and Capacity Building

Donors should focus more on capacity building!

As a consultant, I am currently involved in a project that provides advice to local grassroots initiatives. The project has brought together experts and asked initiatives what kind of advice they need. What is remarkable is that most of the applications from initiatives include requests for support in building organisational structures and internal processes, in finding the most efficient ways of existing. This shows that there is a demand from initiatives for this kind of expertise. 

And I understand that there is a significant lack of this kind of support on the part of donors. As a person used to be responsible for fundraising in the organisation during the last few years, I have seen that there are usually 2 types of calls where capacity building activities can be included:

1. Where 'capacity building' activities may include activities aimed at preventing team burnout or other ways of supporting team members. In this case, we are more likely to choose to support the team rather than spend resources on strategy or redesigning processes;

2. Where you can add capacity building activities, but this will not affect the total amount of the application budget. This means that you should choose whether you are prepared to spend the project money on capacity building or on programme work. The choice is usually quite obvious.

This leads to a permanent lack of funds for capacity building activities in terms of activities that can really gain capacities of the organisation.

This is worth analysing and correcting, I suppose.