What "Capacity Building" Actually Means on the Ground

Below is a post from a friend working in Liberia - more than anything else I've read, it gives a sense of what "capacity building" actually means in a developing country, especially one just emerging from conflict.

Too often, we speak blithely about the need for capacity building - be it in terms of support for civil society organizations, or in support of even broader governance objectives - without sufficient understanding about the challenges and trade-offs on the ground.

Anyone interested in these issues should definitely read the post below.

I have a colleague, we’ll call him Andy, who aspires to be a celebrated academic. I have every confidence that he'll get there. He has been offered not-insubstantial positions in government, but he has turned them all down - preferring instead to keep his professional career determinedly directed towards his professorial, international-journal-contributing, high-level-conference-attending ambitions. Andy is one of the best, most imaginative, most self-reflective Liberian thinkers I have met. No, scratch that - he is one of the best thinkers I have ever met, period.

There is only one small problem: Andy is not yet a great writer.

He can, of course, put things down on paper, but he has not been taught to refine his thoughts into carefully crafted written sentences intended for a reading audience. He writes according to the conventions of Liberian authors—dramatic but vague turns of phrase that incite instead of inform; stumbling half-sentences that emote rather than explain; jumbled ideas that flow helter skelter towards a final paragraph instead of disciplined points that guide concretely towards a logical conclusion.

Within his local framework, Andy writes better than most - but by the Western standards in which he hopes to excel he still has a long way to go. He is open to discussions on ways to improve his prose, and most of what we've talked about has been taken to heart; I can see marked improvement already. But writing is a skill, as much as it is a talent, that takes time and practice to perfect. Andy will get there, but he’s not there yet.

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I have been working closely with another colleague, let’s call him Bob, in organizing and implementing a series of workshops with Liberian women. Bob is a sweet, soft-spoken, humble man who cannot help but do good in the world. He suffered greatly during the war, and you can still see the etchings of pain in his face when he sits still, lost in thought, not aware that anyone might be watching.

Bob has been working on human rights issues for as long as he has been working, and he was a natural candidate to help in our efforts to give women a greater voice in some of the recovery processes that are ongoing at the national level. Among our project team, Bob served as the head note-taker. This meant that he was saddled with the great task of typing up all the hand-written notes that we had accumulated across the country. When the notes were finished I asked Bob to send them by email to the rest of our team for review. It took Bob a solid minute to admit that, though he could send emails, he did not know how to attach a document to one.

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I have another colleague, we’ll call him Charlie, who is trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. He’s young and still inexperienced, but he knows that there’s more out there. He cannot yet see beyond his world, but he’s made efforts - some deliberate and some haphazard- to get himself into a position in which a window beyond Liberia is available. He just hasn’t yet prioritized the initiative, or perhaps found the courage, to really peer through and then accept how the view will have changed his perspective once he turns to look back. I think he'll get there, but even if he doesn't, he’s already taken himself far closer than most, and that in itself is an achievement.

One of the first tasks I worked on with Charlie was an effort to update a chronological list of all the activities my organization had undertaken since we got here. It’s a bulleted summary, organized by month, that highlights main outputs or time-intensive processes in which we were involved. In reviewing Charlie's work, I realized that, though Charlie could type, he did not know how to format bulleted lists in a word document. Fair enough. So I sat with him and gave him a quick tutorial, including a few exercises, before asking him to apply the lessons to the document he had prepared. I sat with him as he did this, and it was only then that I realized that Charlie had been manually hitting the Return key at the end of all of his lines and manually indenting the beginning of each line by counting the number of times he hit the space bar. Charlie had learned to type on a typewriter; nobody had bothered to tell him that computers have automated a lot of those tasks.

Liberia’s greatest challenge, in my humble opinion, is not the unresolved land disputes or the corrupt officials or the pontificating former warlords - it is the profound human capacity deficit. The examples above only scratch the surface. I have a friend working for a Minister who did not know how to download something off of a website. I have another friend working with people in the health sector who are responsible for forecasting drug demand but who do not know how to do a Sum function in an Excel spreadsheet.

Sometimes, often times, the problem goes deeper than basic office/computer difficulties - there are lawyers who can’t direct examine; doctors who can’t properly diagnose; teachers who don’t know how to read; etc. The point is not that Liberians are stupid - inherently they’re neither more nor less intelligent than the rest of the world; the point is that two decades of severe political unrest on top of more than a century of very imbalanced educational and employment opportunities has left the country’s human capital accounts overdrawn and bankrupt.

But, as in all situations of scarcity, Liberians have done what they can and filled the gaps where they could. They’ve been asked to join the globalized world without being given a full introduction, to go from pre-industrialized to post- in a less than a generation, and in order to meet the challenge they’ve had to compensate. And in so doing, they’ve often masked, both deliberately and inadvertently, some of the basic skills deficiencies that still exist.

So, when groups like mine show up in the country, we meet Andy, who is educated and articulate and we think: Great, this man will be a wonderful researcher/report-writer. Or we meet Bob, with whom we exchange emails, and we think: fantastic, he’s computer literate. Or we meet Charlie, who produces for us ord documents, and we think: wonderful, he knows basic Microsoft Office. Perhaps we meet someone with a medical degree and we think: thank god, someone who knows medicine! Or we hire an attorney who has been practicing for years, and we assume that s/he’ll know Liberian law. But what we don’t see, at least not right away, is that though these things are not fully wrong, they are only half-truths. There are almost always serious, and oft times overlooked, holes in foundational competencies. Skills have developed nonlinearly and unequally.

What we see instead, because it’s what we are looking for, are the more glaring knowledge gaps - the specialized skill sets that are missing, the lack of technical know-how in areas in which we have developed our expertise - be it on how to build bridges or train teachers or draft legislation or prescribe drugs or design reparations. And so we develop complex “Capacity Building” programs that aim to build a cadre of disciples who grasp and will promote our technical issues, never really bothering to make sure that the basic skills – those things that we take for granted, those things that are a prerequisite for effective use of the specialized skills - are there.

When there is so much to do and such a rush to do it all, the great challenge for internationals is to balance the need to ‘get things done’ with the need to ensure that our Liberian counterparts will be able to do the same things once we’ve gone. It would be far easier for me to simply edit Andy’s papers and leave it at that. It would take a lot less time just to send Bob’s files as attachments on my own emails. I could easily, in a matter of minutes, format what it takes Charlie over an hour to do, not counting the 20 minutes that I’ll spend sitting with him explaining how to do it.

But the short-term time-save, though it might make my schedule feel less frantic right then, will not make my job here any easier in the long-run. So long as it’s not an emergency – and things rarely are, though it often feels as if they were – it’s usually better to see your efforts as a process, not a product, and to focus on the former rather than the latter. That doesn’t always help when your HQ or your donors or your partners want to see Results, and it’s not always easy to invest in the people if they seem disinterested or dishonest or just a little bit resentful—but ultimately it’s a question of strategy and legacy. How do we make fast progress (which is necessary to maintain the negative peace) without compromising sustainable progress (which is necessary to build the positive peace)?

There’s no single Right Answer to the question – it's not particularly unique and is something that post-conflict practitioners have been grappling with for decades – but one answer must be to build local skills whenever the opportunity presents—never assuming what someone knows or does not know or what you might learn from them in return. With the right people with the right skills the other problems in this country would – or at least could – be more readily addressed.

[Liberians at a campaign rally in Monrovia - Photo from the New York Times]