Insights

By Lydia Odeh (SCALE Chief of Party) and ThankGod Okosun (SCALE Organizational Development Advisor)

As an Organizational Development (OD) expert, what kind of tool do you dream of to make your interventions easier and more effective? Ideally, you might desire a smarter and user-friendly tool that is widely accepted and devoid of ambiguous interpretation. This dream world is possible, by harmonizing organizational capacity assessment (OCA) tools to obtain meaningful, consistent results.

Our understanding of capacity development is that it is a process by which individuals and organizations gain, improve, and retain the skills, knowledge, tools, equipment, and other resources needed to be more effective. While it isn’t always easy, capacity development is always worth the investment. More importantly, it often takes a mindset shift for civil society leaders to envision how capacity building can enhance their organizations’ efforts and achieve greater results.

As OD experts, this belief has driven our ideology over the years. However, an OCA tool that is aligned to an organization’s needs rarely exists at the inception of any capacity building intervention. Different people and organizations collect data in the way that suits them, and they may not follow standard requirements to ensure a smart and friendly tool. Consequently, harmonizing data from different sources requires the need to customize them to a specific project/context/organization.

Recently, we had collected several different versions of OCAs applied by different organizations and projects in Nigeria. But what to make of it? How do we make sense of the various versions and make them more applicable to the wider civil society organizations in Nigeria?  We had been thinking a lot about these questions, along with our colleagues at the USAID-funded Strengthening Civic Advocacy and Local Engagement (SCALE) project, when we came across a quote from Lucas Stewart, a data for results analyst. He said, “If you are confronted with versions of data and if your data is not harmonized, you’re restricted to looking at your sources of data separately– and that’s counterintuitive to the reality of modern capacity building intervention.” We would add that you need the contribution of experienced professionals to get the best outcome. Recently, we put this hypothesis into practice by using an innovative, co-creation approach to develop and produce a widely acceptable and user-friendly OCA for the SCALE project in Nigeria.

Prior to experts’ discussions on the OCA, we conducted a review of the evidence generated through other projects and organizations’ OCA analyses, which provided a foundation to conduct further analyses.

The co-creation strategy brought together diverse ideas, opinions, and contributions from organizational development (OD) experts to identify key component areas to produce an acceptable OCA for CSOs/BMOs in Nigeria. Cohorts of very experienced and widely sought-after experts with over 15 years of practice worked through the various OCAs to produce a simplified, but comprehensive, OCA tool that could be referenced and accepted by OD experts in Nigeria.

The workshop employed brainstorming, group work, and interactive approaches. Through presentations and plenary discussions, the workshop reached consensus on components and sub-components as indicators for measuring outcomes.

While reviewing the tools, experts in the room agreed on focus areas, or “where to target capacity building efforts” to ensure the tool would be acceptable and comprehensive.

Based on these focus areas, we developed the harmonized tool, which identifies 11 domains of organizational capacity deemed essential for improving the sustainable performance of Nigerian CSOs/BMOs:  leadership and governance, structures & systems, human resources, organizational management, financial management, procurement, resource mobilization, project performance management, Monitoring Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL), external relations and Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI). The Capacity Assessment Tool assists in estimating overall capacity as well as the strengths and weaknesses in each domain to inform planning by civil society organizations to progress to more advanced stages of readiness to access large grants and sustain performance.

Before deploying this tool, we subjected it to rigorous review using experienced Palladium capacity development experts and a pre-test to determine how the tool can be effectively applied to address capacity building needs and be more user-friendly and applicable nationally.

What outcome is there to elicit from building reliable and sustainable tools in capacity strengthening projects? There are three important outcomes we achieved. We:

• Modified existing tools to fit the Nigerian CSOs’ context for use
• Improved the Capacity Assessment Tool to make it comprehensive, acceptable, and user-friendly for organizational capacity development experts in Nigeria
• Made recommendations for new areas where capacity building is needed to transition CSOs to become direct recipients of large donor grants – e.g. Company and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) compliance, gender equality and social inclusion integration, and use of technology

In summary, if you wish to design and use a comprehensive and user-friendly OCA tool that meets the needs of diverse organizations at national or sub-national levels, consider using a co-creation strategy to engage diverse and experienced experts throughout the process.

What’s next? We are ready to deploy the tool and of course lessons learned will be shared.