Capacity building versus dominant donors

The practice of development cooperation is to a great extent shaped by the relationships between Western donors and their local counterparts. Many donors use concepts of partnership and ownership to establish and define these relations. What’s more, they advocate that these relationships should be based on the needs of the local organization. However, in practice many relationships between donors and the organizations that they support are characterized by dependency. And this dependency is often enforced by the attitudes and perceptions of the donor, the local organization, or both.

But what happens to capacity building efforts in an organization, if the organization is inclined to ‘bend’ towards donor’s ideas over their own? And if the donor is presenting its ideas in a top-down manner, linked to funding? When this relates to the subject of capacity building efforts undertaken in a certain organization, this may affect the sustainability of these efforts. Local organizations may almost automatically follow the donor’s approaches and ideas instead of their own, even if they have built capacity on these specific approaches and ideas.

This article is based on a discussion about this question between several ICCO capacity builders working in different places of the world. The discussion revolved around a real-life case that was presented by one of the capacity building advisors.

‘Bending’ attitudes of local organizations
The case that started off the discussion and this article involves a medium sized local organization in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In this organization capacity building efforts are taken place on mainly monitoring and evaluation systems, by an ICCO advisor.

The organization in general has a ‘bending’ or submissive attitude towards donors. This is first of all caused by a deeply felt dependency on donors for survival. Also, cultural elements play a role in this attitude towards donors. There exists a general submissive attitude towards foreigners, and foreigners often represent Western donors. In the organization described in this specific case it is furthermore not seen as respectful to disagree with donors, or to discuss critical notions with the donors.

With the ‘bending’ attitude of the organization, there arises a growing tension between the organization’s own ideas and the ideas of the donors. This means that sometimes the organization is pressed towards going a certain direction, which not necessarily reflects its own priorities or ideas.

Dominant donor styles
The advisory style of the ICCO advisor working in this organization focuses on the implementation of ideas from the organization’s staff themselves. Also, the ICCO advisor consciously makes efforts not to be perceived as an advisor working for ICCO. As ICCO is one of the donors of the organization, this might affect the relationship.

Related to this specific case is another expatriate advisor that joined one of the projects of the organization. This advisor has a different, more dominant advisory style from the ICCO advisor, showing strong opinions about how certain things should be in the organization, and presenting herself as a representative of the donor.

The advisory style of the new expatriate advisor has affected the ICCO capacity building advisor directly in several ways. At the outset, the new advisor strongly advocated the adoption of the monitoring and evaluation system of the donor she represents. This caused stress with the organization’s staff, who had been developing their own monitoring and evaluation system as part of the capacity building efforts of the ICCO advisor.

Also, the staff approached the ICCO advisor to express their uneasiness with some other ideas of the new advisor. Despite this uneasiness, they intended to follow and implement most of the ideas of the advisor, even if they did not necessarily agree with them, because of the more general cultural reasons as mentioned earlier in this article.

Read the full article on the ICCO Blog.

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