Building Capacity in Local Government Organizations

I discovered that the Government Ministries here in Uganda tend to think of capacity development for local government almost entirely in terms of staff training. Most of the training is by short courses, given be contractors funded by local government and prequalified by the Ministry.

The point of view is natural, in that in the evil days of Obote and Amin, local government was all but destroyed. The Musevini government has been working for 20 years to rebuild local government, and has decentralized the implementation of many services to the local governments. Ranging from Districts to villages, there are maybe 50,000 local governments. There was a huge job to be done getting local political leaders to understand how to run local councils, and to establish the cadre of more than 300,000 workers needed to run the decentralized school, health, agricultural extension and other decentralized services. No wonder the government resorted to short courses on key skills to meet immediate needs.

I attended a Joint Assessment of the local government program, where people from the local governments themselves said this focus was now too narrow. They need help not only to train people, but to retain the people trained. The local government capacity depends also on bricks and morter -- facilities in which people can work effectively. It depends on equipment, such as working motorcycles so that people can get into the countryside and interact with their clients, and computers and telephones. And people work in teams, so it is necessary to have all of the necessary skills in the team. (I would say "team building" is also needed; putting a bunch of people together does not necessarily make them into an effective working team. People have to learn to work together.) The local government units need help to utilize the skills of their workers fully. Local government people also stressed the importance of having training officers in their own teams, and of having the ability to do some kinds of training themselves with their own staff trainers.

University people pointed out that there is a need to think in terms of career development, and not just short-term skills training. If you want good decisions made at the local level, you need people who are trained to think analytically, and who can use history to guide their analysis; long term education is the best on perhaps only way to develop such skills. On the one hand, there ought to be training programs for individual workers and teams so that the training builds over time, while urgent needs can be put first in time. On the other hand, there ought to be opportunities for diploma and degree training.

It was noted that doctors, nurses and engineers are professionally certified, and a non-professional government official can have confidence that a doctor or engineer has at least basic completency even if the higher official can not judge that competency himself. It was suggested that there should be other accreditation systems so that, for example, someone seeking to transfer between Districts would come with a certification of competency, and the new district could be sure the new employee satisfied criteria of at least basic skills and knowledge.

I was struck by the need to think carefully about the appropriate techniques for specific training needs. Some training could I think be done by simple broadcasts or tape recordings at a very low cost. Thus a simple message, that an epidemic was in place and immunizations are necessary could be provided simply. When a new technique is introduced (e.g. a new drug in the health system, a new accounting procedure, a new material for road construction) a short course would seem useful, especially if it were quickly and widely disseminated. Again, I would think each District office might eventually have a television equipped classroom that could provide such short courses thru distance education at very low cost per training program.

I have thought there are many ways that an organization can improve its capacity. It can reorganize so that it brings the knowledge and skills of its members more fully to bear on the most important decisions it has to make. It can change procedures also to accomplish that purpose. Team building also helps. An organization can increase its knowledge and skill base not only by training but by hiring people with new knowledge and skills, by partnering with another organization with complementary knowledge and skills, or by outsourcing. I agree that facilities are an important part of organizational capacity. I also suggest that with information and communications technologies developing as they have, organizations can increase capacity through appropriate acquisition and utilization of ICT.