This is an invitation to comment on the attached document
PLEASE SEND COMMENTS TO: Heather Baser, baser@rogers.com
There is much talk between donors and partner countries about results and more specifically the importance of Managing for Development Results (MfDR) for improving aid and development effectiveness. But many country partners and development agencies believe that the approaches of MfDR do not adequately recognize capacity results and especially its "soft" aspects such as the ability to drive change and to build processes, organizations, and institutions which can deliver public services over the long term. MfDR tends to rely on a high degree of planning and control of interventions and a predictable relationship between inputs and outputs whereas capacity development requires a flexible, iterative approach.
As part of the lead up to the next High-Level Meeting in Busan, Korea in November, there will be a workshop on capacity development in Cairo on March 28-29. LenCD has written the attached paper on managing for capacity results for the workshop, drawing on the literature and limited consultations focused on the challenges of defining, monitoring and measuring capacity results.
We would welcome your comments on this paper, particularly on how we can sharpen it for the politicians and policy makers who will attend the Cairo session.
We should point out that the paper is a first cut of issues related to capacity results and is a work in progress. It does not purport to be comprehensive but does try to reflect some of the often disparate views held by different groups such as politicians, donors, beneficiaries and specialist M&E people, among others. We have tried to find a middle ground between two main agendas - policy audiences in Cairo and later Busan, and a more technical audience interested in pursuing the topic further. Because its main audience is the Cairo workshop, the paper is short. This means that it does not pick up all the wealth of detail that came out of the consultations. We have kept this information to help in fleshing out a plan for a workstream.
We encourage comments. Those received before March 12 will be taken into account in the next version of the paper.