Call for submission of countries’ experiences planning for and reporting on capacity development results

While there is consensus on the importance of results, particularly capacity development results, country governments  face challenges in planning, managing, and reporting on them.  

The results-based management (RBM) frameworks that are widely adopted in development practice and by country governments are most often founded on ‘hard’ results, such as the number of schools built, water wells dug, or roads constructed.  These are relatively easy to measure and can be achieved in a relatively short time. However, such results frameworks have usually proven to be unsuitable to capture results deriving from longer and more complex processes of capacity development, such as nurturing inclusive ownership, accountability, leadership development and change in organizational performance.

Capacity development has to do with political processes and cultural and societal changes. These processes produce long-lasting transformation, but they are also long-term and very complex in nature. While results from these processes take a long time to come about, they nevertheless manifest themselves at different levels of the results chain, and at different times.

How do country governments plan for such results? How do they report on them to their citizens?

Call for submission of countries’ experiences

To better facilitate the sharing of knowledge on results and capacity development, with this call for submission LenCD aims at collecting experiences on how countries plan for, manage and report on results from investments in capacity development.  LenCD is, therefore interested in understanding which approaches and methodologies country governments adopt to plan for and report on capacity development results, which innovations are out there, where the good practices are, and what other countries can learn from. Ultimately, this collection of country driven approaches and methodologies on planning and reporting capacity development results could shed light into alternatives for donor-driven reporting requirements.

A selection of the submitted experiences will be published and shared amongst development partners as good practices.

What is LenCD looking for

To respond to this call, country governments can submit a document, or set of documents, illustrating the following:

• How they plan for results from investments in capacity development. With reference to one or more specific government funded (as opposed to donor-funded) projects, countries can submit planning documents, concept papers, project proposals that clearly illustrate how results from capacity development interventions are planned. These documents should clarify the approach and methodology that countries adopt when planning for capacity development results.
• How they report on results from investments in capacity development. With reference to one or more specific government funded (as opposed to donor-funded) projects countries can submit reports that capture results from investments in capacity development. Such reports can be in any format used by the government, including logical frameworks, narrative and others.
• What difficulties countries face when planning for and reporting on results from capacity development. Countries can articulate their monitoring and evaluation process, how they have used all the documents submitted and the challenges they face with using logical (RBM) frameworks, or other approaches and methodologies for planning for, and reporting on results from capacity development.

This call is restricted to government-funded projects for which national (as opposed to donors’) monitoring and evaluation approaches and methodologies are applied.

Who

This call for submission of experiences is addressed to country governments, including M&E officers of Ministries of Finance and Planning, Local Administration, Public Administration and other central Ministries, as well as M&E officers of line Ministries, including Health, Education, Water, Sanitation, Labor, Social Security, and other relevant agencies.

How to share your experiences

Please send your submission to alessandra.casazza@undp.org by Friday 13 April 2012, for review by a LenCD review group (soon to be established) and subsequent publication.

We look forward to receiving your inputs.