I made a new friend last week. This guy works for a Kenya Government Agency that deals with development of a particular disadvantaged section of our country. Only naturally, our discussion quickly slid into the issue of development of northern and other arid regions of kenya and the government's efforts to ameliorate the situation.
My friend spoke about the government's laudable efforts at training the staff within the Agency; which training is compulsory for all the strategic employees. The said training is sponsored by the government and other development partners with a view to increasing the capacity of indigenous or local initiatives and organisations to plan, implement and monitor the country's development.
However, the problem of employee retention plagues the government's and development partners' initiative. After expending considerable resources towards training staff at the said agency (and i believe other government departments), the government is hardly able to maintain appropriate compensation and incentive structures to retain the now-better-trained staff, who shortly after training find more lucrative employment in the private sector. The training efforts in such circumstances turn out to be "privately remunerative but socially wasteful activities" (Pritchet, 2001) as resources intended to benefit the needy society at large instead benefits the
system (workers).
Nils Boesen, in his article
Looking Forward (a results-oriented model) published in the Sept. 05 issue of the World Bank Institute's magazine, Development Outreach proposes an interesting approach to the problem. He suggests that donors and other development partner's should not begin the capacity development (cd) efforts by looking directly at the capacity of the organisation like i think happened in the case of the above government agency.
Instead, he contends, they should start by considering the organisation as a "black box" and investigate what products and services the organisation produces or supplies and the context in which this happens. Thereafter, and only then, should you open the box and see the internal processes that produce the desired results. This approach gives the necessary focus to the context and actual performance of the organisation as measured by the products and services.
By looking directly at the capacity of an organisation (without the necessary focus on the context and measurable performance), the players in the development campaign will tend to apply resources towards meeting internal needs of organisations eg. support for equipment, salary supplements, training and technical assistance; which though important might not necessarily result in the desired and measurable output.
The end of capacity development support is not to have well trained staff, but to see specific changes in output which the capacity development support has enabled i.e. measurable effect of the CD efforts on organisational performance.
