A large international organisation had a major focus on building the capacity of their partner’s finance functions. They were happy with a number of parts of their programmes – but the training they gave was not helping their partner’s finance teams change.
Their budget and time was limited, and I was brought in to assess what was going wrong with their training and provide support to the team that delivered it – who were finance experts, not trainers.
In the analysis phase I ran a few short interviews with stakeholders and potential trainees, which revealed gaps in seeing the broad perspective of capacity building – with the target group jumping straight to training as a solution to capacity building problems.
The client had pre-existing plans to bring the target group together for annual planning meetings, so we agreed to incorporate a day of face-to-face training into their annual meeting. I designed and delivered a custom workshop for them. The sessions looked at where capacity building goes wrong, introduced the concepts and steps of performance improvement, identifying non-training approaches they could use to build capacity, and writing measurable goals for capacity building programmes. They also had to plan out a set of interventions for their current programmes, with only a minor role for training permitted. Finally, to give them confidence and an expanded toolkit when training was needed, they practiced participatory training methods.
Impact: The finance experts developed plans that included less training – saving tens of thousands of dollars in workshop costs.
