Capacity Building

I had an exchange with a friend on capacity building, and thought I might share some of the thoughts. We were talking in the context of building scientific capacity of universities in poor countries.

I suppose that the first step in capacity building is making sure there is a physical plant in which research and learning can take place. I am not talking about fancy facilities, but there must be a place where students can be safe and can do their work. In the case of science education, there have to be fairly expensive facilities, such as laboratories. That means also there has to be electricity, refrigeration, and other utilities that allow the laboratories to work and samples and cultures to be maintained. There also has to be a computer and communications infrastructure, and a library that is supplied with appropriate books and journals. But building a plant that the university can not sustain is not going to work.

Certainly, a key step in building capacity is building human capacity of the faculty in those universities. Graduate training for faculty is a must, and it should be done in good universities. I do like the idea of sandwich programs, in which grad students keep an affiliation with their developing country university, and do some of the graduate work, especially the research, in that developing country. And of course there is a place for distance education, and for training in how to teach and how to be effective in a developing country university.

Training a few people from a very weak university that is having real problems, and then returning them to that environment is not likely to do much good. Either those people will be overwhelmed with the problems that they face and be ineffective, or they will leave for a better school, in country or abroad. Or they will leave science -- lots of scientist-cab drivers around the world!

Thus capacity building also involves building the managerial capacity in the institution to keep it running well. It involves setting a national policy framework that allows the university to function well. A university that is doubling in size every two or three years, trying to do so with a severely limited budget, and with a faculty that is short on human resources will not work.

USAID discovered decades ago, that an important part of capacity development was the creation of the linkages needed for the university to be effective. The university has to have linkages with educational policy makers in government, with the sources of financing it requires, with labor markets for the human resources it needs and those it produces, with the sectors of society that must look to the university for knowledge and technology, etc.

For a university to meet expectations in the modern world it must not be an ivory tower that produces new knowledge and new technology, and students trained a curriculum designed in advanced nations. A university should be producing knowledge, educated people, technology and services that are useful and used by their local communities and by their nations. The linkages are critical for this purpose. So too is a relevant, high quality curriculum, and a portfolio of science programs that both meets immediate needs and lays the basis for meeting future national needs.

These days, I suspect, a lot of capacity development is done in facilities where the plant already exists and is more or less adequate, Human resource development will be important, especially in countries that are rapidly expanding university educational opportunities, as so many developing nations are. But the investments in soft areas of organizational capital are extremely important, and remain important in the United States and other developed nations.