Capacity Building Of NGOs In Nepal
For Effective & Efficient Service

By Shankar P. Rajbhandari

NGOs in Nepal have seen overwhelmingly proliferation since last couple of decades. But many of them are not in the regular operation. The survival of NGOs is one important issue whereas their capacity building is another crucial challenge faced by most of the NGOs today. In analysing the identity of NGOs in Nepal, they are not operating as the parallel or alternative entities of the government agencies. Rather, they are prevailing as co-partners in the national development process. However, the paramount roles of NGOs toward socio-economic upliftment of the country have made their importance more and more vital.

Development

Due to paucity of resources and lengthy bureaucratic process, it has widely been accepted that development activites in developing countries cannot move forward merely through public efforts. For this, government requires substantial support from non-government sector. Moreover, NOGs’ support for development is imperative because NGOs can enhance participation in decision -making by mobilising and organising the local population and increasing their ability to act collectively and make demands of the state and policy makers. Besides, NGO sector contributes to a sustainable and more equitable process of economic, social, and political development in different ways.

In view of the above fact, NGOs in developing countries are emerging as powerful development vehicles. As NGO sector contributes to a greater degree of social and political pluralism in society, this sector is actively striving to create the conditions conducive to more equitable forms of development that has gradually become developing society per se.

The technical word capacity-building is very much closer to the terms organisation development and institutional development. Yet, they are often confused. Institutional development is concerned to wider changes in society and seeks to intitiate changes outside the boundaries of a single organisation, while organisation development is limited to the internal functioning of an organisation. Institutional developing is concerned with creating the conditions in which development can take place, and effecting macro-changes in the structure of social and economic relations.

Capacity building differs from institutional development in a way that capacity building means changes within a single organisation by means of technical assistance, organisational assistance, and organisational development. Institutional development changes in social, political, and economic structures through strengthening NGO sector, national institutional framework, and international reforms.

Capacity building relates to both-organisational as well as individual context. In this respect, capacity building is closer to the organisation development and distinctly different from institutional development. Notably, institutional development covers the broad spectrum within which capacity-building limits its territory within an organisation. In other words, if institutional development comes under macro level, capacity building relates to the micro level, Importantly, both are reformative in approach and adaptive in spirits.

However, capacity building in organisational context can be defined as an explicit intervention that aims to improve an organisation’s effectiveness and sustainability in relation to its missions. Capacity building is, in fact, an umbrella word encompassing a wide range of activities that contribute to improving NGO performance and sustainability.

Capacity building of NGOs is essential to deliver efficient and effective services to the focus group. To this end, one should try to understand first, the mandate, scope, and organisational missions. NGO capacity building aproach should be looked at from the holistic perspective.

Building the capacity of an individual organisation in isolation is ultimately going to have limited effect if the wider institutional framework is not considered. Thus, efforts to build the capacity of individual NGOs need to be supplemented by activities, which contribute to the institutional development of the sector as a whole. This view is also supported by the organisation learning theory, which advocates that individual learning is essential for organisational learning but individual learning is not a sufficient requisite for organisation learning.

For capacity building of an NGO, capacity of its individual staff members is essentially enhanced. Yet, it does not guarantee NGO capacity building. Thus, NGO capacity building is a sum total of individual capacity building efforts plus something else-transformation and improvement of the key organisational variables such as policies, programs, strategies, structure, system, leadership, resources, linkages, and others.

Notably, capacity building of NGOs in Nepal has largely been focused on human development and very little on system improvement. This has usually made the organisational capacity building programs lop-sided. Since the aim of capacity building of NGOs cannot be achieved merely from one single aspect, either human development or system development. Rather, it should be both.

Capacity building of NGOs can be perceived in terms of five major arena. These are adative capacity, strategic capacity, management capacity, technological capacity, and professional capacity.

Since the speed of organisational growth largely rests on its adaptive capacity, NGOs have to give emphasis on developing its capability to bring change in their organisations with regard to internal as well as external environmental change perspectives. Therefore, one of the core areas of caacity building of NGOs is to develop their adaptive capability.

Likewise, strategic capacity of NGOs covers the individual organisational capacity of NGOs to set strategic thinking and long term vision to drive the organisation into the new strategic direction. How pragmatic the set visions are in order to cater the practical needs and desires of the service recipients; and how practically organisational visions, missions and goals have been able to articulate as well as to put them into actions are the basic yard sticks of the success of strategic capacity of a particular NGO. For this, a number of analytical tools are to be used such as-three dimensional analysis, gap analysis, situational analysis, SWOC analysis, content analysis, and others.

Management capacity of an NGO mainly determines the capacity of managing-an ideal organisational structure; efficient management systems and procedures; efficient resource management mechanism; cultivation of a learning organisational culture; and existence of dynamic leadership in the organisation.

Similarly, technological capacity of NGOs includes the capacity of an organisation to equip with the modrn technology in order to provide efficient and effective service delivery to the clients. The modern technology covers mainly the methods, process, techniques, knowldge, information, and applications of modern devices. The methods, process, and techniques could be both-indigenous as well as exotic, But it should be borne in mind that whatever the technology used in the name of modernity, they sould be appropriate and cost-effective.

Enhancing professional capacity of NGOs means ability to ensure professional ethics in providing services to its target audience. There should not be compromise in the professional matter of services irrespective of the shape and size of the organisation. The hall mark of the organisation largely determines by the quality of services and ability of the organisation to maintain professionalism.

A balance growth of the above different arena of organisational capacity is a must for devising a healthy NGOs. Howver, the task to make a proper balance of the above components is neither easy nor impossible.

Lessons

Since a good lesson is a good strategy for program success, the followings are some of the concrete lessons that can be duly prescribed for developing a good strategy for effective implementation of the programs envisaged by INGOs and NGOs currently working in Nepal.

The first lesson is that as a matter of fact, most NGOs allow their organisational capabilities to develop in a spontaneous and unplanned manner, assuming that the organisational and managerial capacity to handle growth will develop as needed . In most cases, these assumptions are proved incorrect. This point is particularly relevant to young NGOs in developing counries like Nepal but does not necessarily apply in all cases. Therefore, capacity building of NGOs is regarded as a deliberate approach which has to be carefully initiated by the NGO partners at large.

Second, NGOs work in turbulent political and social contexts and they are likely subject to be influenced by a wide range of external pressures from governments, communities, and donors. Many NGO in Nepal are being unnecessarily over controlled by the donors if not, a number of NGOs are heavily dominated by the government entities. Some NGOs remain under the pressurised control of the local communities. This sort of working environment for NGOs in Nepal is not only a fatal barrier for their institutional growth but also a sickening blow toward providing the desirable sevices to the poor general people.

Third, many Nepalese NGOs continue to have a technical bias and their efforts to increase the development impact of programmes tend to focus on upgrading the technical skills of their staff or improving sevice delivery mechanism. Although such technical improvements can enchance the performance of an NGO, the underlying organisational abilities to use technical, financial and human resources effectively remain untouched.

Strategy

In view of the above lessons, Nepalese NGOs should have essentially developed their strategy to curb the above mentioned challenges. For this, the enhancement of the individual capacity of the staff members as well as of the organisational capacity should be made by use of practical tools-vision with clarity, programmes with practicability, techniques equally focusing on indigenous ones, resources also with time perspectives and commitments based on performance.