Capacity Strengthening of Civil Society Organizations

This indicator measures the number of civil society organizations that have increased their technical capacity relative to a baseline. The term “technical capacity” includes the following dimensions: I. Participation and networking, II. Program and human resource management, III. Sector expertise and learning, IV. Financial management, and V. Procurement and logistics. It is recommended that WHH projects that work in partnership with civil society actors for more than six months also work to increase these partners’ technical capacity. To this end, WHH uses Manual 6b as a Civil Society Partner Assessment tool. In order to assess whether capacity strengthening measures have been successful, the tool should be re-applied either annually or at the end of the project, in order to ensure maximum effective, useful and traceable capacity strengthening. In addition, by reporting this indicator, WHH retains sufficient oversight about how its capacity strengthening is advancing, which helps to remain accountable to both civil society and funding partners.

This indicator should be collected by projects that focus on capacity strengthening of civil society partners and that run for more than six months. Examples include projects that have a Programming Towards improved Nutrition focus, also Multi Actors Partnership Programs.

Method: Use of the partner assessment tool - Manual 6b (link).

The first round of the assessment should be taken as the baseline. Following this, the civil society organization should be re-assessed either at the end of the project (if the project lasts no more than one year), or annually.

The Welthungerhilfe project that uses this indicator should re-assess the organization fully using Manual 6b again. Alternatively, if time or resource constraints apply, the project can focus only on the low-ranked capacities that the project chose to work on and assess if any progress has been made against these.

Questions: Based on the notes from the assessment tool, please assess the capacity of the organization (low, medium, high) against the following criteria:

How to calculate:

For both the baseline and a given follow-up round, apply the following steps:

1. Count the number of capacities that are ranked as low.
2. Count the number of capacities that are ranked as medium and multiply by 2.
3. Count the number of capacities that are ranked as high and multiply by 3.
4. Sum up the three scores, then divide the sum by the number of capacities assessed, in order to obtain the average capacity score.

The indicator value is the number of Civil Society Organizations whose average capacity score is higher during a given follow-up round than during the baseline.

What activities should the indicator be used for?

This indicator should be collected by projects that focus on capacity strengthening of civil society partners and that run for more than six months. Examples include projects that have a Programming Towards improved Nutrition focus, also Multi Actors Partnership Programs.

 Size of civil society organization: national/local NGO, community-based organizations

 Can be applied for one organization or for several program participating organizations.