Evaluating capacity development: Experiences from research and development organizations

This book, developed by ISNAR's Evaluating Capacity Development Project, explains how an action-learning approach was used to conduct six evaluation studies over the course of 3 years.

The authors use examples and lessons drawn from the evaluation studies as a basis for making more general conclusions regarding how capacity-development efforts and evaluation can help organizations to achieve their missions.

Please note, ISNAR ceased operations in March 2004.

"Our studies found that monitoring and evaluating organizational capacity development is of critical importance to ensuring that capacity development initiatives actually lead to improved performance. Monitoring and evaluation can play crucial roles in an organizational capacity development process by fostering learning from experience and helping to ensure that capacity development meets its intended objectives.

A self-assessment approach to monitoring and evaluation of capacity development can help engage managers, staff, and external stakeholders in assessing an organization’s capacity and its capacity development needs. It also builds their understanding of organizational strengths and weaknesses as a basis for developing commitment to implementing organizational changes where needed." (Horton, Alexaki,  Bennett-Lartey, Brice, Campilan,  Carden, De Souza Silva, 2003)

Contents

• The Evaluating Capacity Development Project: an Experiment in Evaluating Capacity Development
• The Basks of Capacity, Organizational Capacity Development, and Evaluation
• Why Managers should be Concerned with Organizational Capacity Development and its Evaluation
• Towards a Holistic Approach to Organizational Capacity Development
• Towards Partnership in Organizational Capacity Development
• Approaches for Evaluating Organizational Capacity Development
• Using and Benefiting from an Evaluation