Capacity building critique

Few things in international development seem to be sexier than capacity building. It's the solution to everything. If only there would be more workshops, more capacity building, more training problems in any given developing country will surely, one day, vanish.

But please, when exactly is that day going to come? Capacity is mobile. It has legs. It can generally walk out the door. And where the demand for it is higher than supply, it often does walk out the door.

Whilst we are waiting for Nirvana with every one building capacity feeling good about themselves people are still suffering because the services that should be delivered from this capacity ain't coming. And they won't even when the workshop is over if the capacity decides to move somewhere else.

An equally important question is: how can we rework this job to reduce the needed capacity for it? Think like Henry Ford! He pumped out the Model T for prices no one thought possible doing it that way. And he didn't need to wait for capacity to be built to start the automobile revolution, because he designed jobs in a way that they could be done by almost anyone.

Of course not everything can be reduced to that level. But quite a few things can be broken down a lot more than they often are. And that can help get results today, not whenever after tomorrow which may or may not ever come.

That doesn't mean keeping people stupid either. Having a spell check does not stop me from learning how to spell. Having a calculator does not prevent you from doing long hand multiplication if you want to. Capacity building is not the whole picture, and it's not the whole answer, and it's generally too slow for the short to medium term.