Report and Checklist - Capacity Development in Public Private Partnerships - Lessons Learnt from NL Funded Projects

Excerpt from the summary

The review uses the OECD (2006) definition of Capacity Development (CD) as “the process whereby people, organisations and society as a whole unleash, strengthen, create, adapt and maintain capacity over time”. This definition of CD is broader than typically used in FDOV/SDGP documentation, which tends to equate CD with training, and typically training of farmers in good agricultural practices. Indeed, the FDOV/SDGP Programmes can be considered to be “capacity development projects” in general, hence the review treated CD more as a “lens” through which to analyse public private partnership projects, rather than as a distinct set of activities within these projects. We also focus more on the “soft” side of CD rather than on the “hardware” of physical infrastructure development.

Following generally understood concepts of capacity development in international literature, the review viewed CD in the FDOV/SDGO projects at 3 “levels”: individual, organisational and institutional. Typically, these projects focus(ed) on a particular commodity or value chain, and include(d) actions to strengthen capacity at each of these levels. However, the emphasis of the projects (e.g. expressed as relative expenditure) is usually at the individual level, on training individual farmers (including “lead” or demonstration farmers) and developing the group of farmer trainers necessary (i.e. "training of trainers”). Most projects reviewed also included efforts to strengthen producer organisations (farmer cooperatives) and - usually with less effort in terms of expenditure - other organisations in the direct supply chain (such as input dealers, aggregators, processors, etc.). Except for extension services, organisations from supporting services, such as research, education (vocational colleges, universities), finance, etc. were less targeted for project support. Least common (in terms of overall expenditure) were efforts at the “institutional level”; such as lobbying government to affect policies, regulations, and also establishing mechanisms (e.g. multi-stakeholder associations) to improve the coherence and integration of value chains. We conclude that mechanisms such as FDOV/SDGP could be improved by a more systematic and balanced analysis of the integrated capacity development needs and interventions at these 3 levels, during both project and implementation.