CREATING A STRATEGIC VISION

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that many local organisations lack strategic vision, meaning that they stop/start or change direction according to funding. Many CSOs are the product of an individual or family and lack deeper roots in the communities they aim to serve. Coordination between them and interaction with other actors is often weak. The difficult physical linkages across the country (due to poor infrastructure, and adverse climate and insecurity) make it harder for them to access resources, which are heavily concentrated in Juba. While there is capacity building support provided, this is often in the limited form of training and manuals, and is focused on project implementation and compliance issues.

DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

The CSF aims to do things differently. CSF will target the whole organisation and thus move beyond the more classic project-focused approach of most funders. CSF will encourage CSOs to take responsibility and feel ownership for their own capacity development processes. As a starting point local organisations will be facilitated to assess their own capacity, identify their problems and prioritise those to be addressed. Moreover, the timeframe will be longer than the standard project duration of 12 months, because capacity development processes takes longer than a typical development project and the various methods will be tailored to the local needs, in other words CSF will avoid using blue-prints of standard classroom trainings.

A TAYLORMADE APPROACH

CSF will use a combination of capacity development methods including: formal training, mentoring, coaching, accompaniment, exchange visits and peer to peer visits. The focus, where possible, will be on decentralised delivery, in other words training interventions will take place in the same area as where the organisation is active. This tailored approach, applied locally will help CSF to be effective in adjusting its intervention to the current crisis. A decentralized set-up will also make the coordination with other actors manageable and this will be important for ensuring effective cooperation and links with the NGO-forum, local governments and UN clusters. The idea is to start and build up from a relatively small base and then spread out more widely and go more deeply over time.