Document(s) 4 of 15

The ECD Project

The initial idea to develop a project on the evaluation of capacity development in research and development organizations emerged in 1999 during discussions between Fred Carden of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Julian Gonsalves of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), and Doug Horton of the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR) on the need for better understanding of how capacity development takes place and how its results can be evaluated. For several years, IDRC’s Evaluation Unit had been working with Universalia Management Group to develop and apply frameworks and methods for organizational assessment. ISNAR had applied some of these frameworks and methods in evaluating its efforts to strengthen planning, monitoring, and evaluation capacity in agricultural research organizations. IIRR had recently been challenged to document the impacts of its rural development work, and was eager to learn about methods to do so.

As a result of these discussions, an action-learning project was formulated to explore issues of capacity development and its evaluation with a group of people who were working to strengthen capacity in research and development organizations and who were interested in evaluating their efforts. To stimulate learning from a range of diverse experiences, people from various countries, regions, and types of organizations were involved. To put some limits on the types of participating individuals and organizations, it was decided to involve managers and evaluation practitioners in research and development organizations who were concerned with agricultural or rural development (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The six evaluation studies

Exploring capacity development in a rural development NGO in Bangladesh
Towards strategic management in a Cuban agricultural research institute
Understanding capacity development in a plant genetic resources center in Ghana
Assessing organizational change in an agricultural faculty in Nicaragua
Strengthening participatory research capacities in a Philippines root crops research center
Expanding capacities in a rural development institute in Viet Nam

Past evaluations of capacity development, including those of ISNAR, IDRC, and IIRR, had often focused on measuring the results or impacts of international programs on the capacity or performance of national or local organizations. While organizations in the South have carried out some evaluations, the field is still dominated by international organizations and reflects their perspectives and interests. To mitigate this type of ‘northern’ or ‘international’ bias, it was decided to involve professionals from ‘recipient’ national and local organizations in planning and implementing the ECD Project and to focus on the evaluation work from their perspectives.

A project document prepared in early 2000 served as a basis for negotiating the support of donors as well as the participation of international and national organizations in the project. The basic objective of the ECD Project was to improve capacity development efforts in research and development organizations through the use of evaluation.

The Project’s specific objectives were to

• strengthen participants’ capacity to carry out their own evaluations;
• conduct a set of evaluation studies on capacity development;
• draw conclusions from the studies that could be useful in designing, implementing, and evaluating future capacity development efforts;
• compile and disseminate frameworks and methods for evaluating capacity development.

The initial phase of the ECD Project involved problem definition, planning, and the design of a set of evaluation studies to be carried out by independent evaluation teams made up of members of the participating organizations. In the next phase, six evaluation studies were carried out, with modest technical and financial support from the ECD coordination team and consultants. Later, the teams came together to discuss their experiences, synthesize their findings, and prepare this book.

Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of evaluations are carried out in research or development organizations each year. Most of these evaluations assess the progress or results of projects or programs and are carried out to meet the external accountability requirements of funding bodies that support research and development activities. Very few evaluations have been carried out to assess the capacity of organizations to conduct research or development activities, the capacity development processes themselves, or the extent to which capacity development leads to an improvement in the organization’s performance.

To begin filling this void and to promote discussion and understanding of how organizations’ capacities develop and contribute to performance, the project focused on the development of the capacity of organizations, rather than on the delivery of inputs, products or services, or the transfer of technology. It focused on organizational capacity rather than individual or project-level capacity. An attempt was made to understand and reflect the different perspectives of different groups involved in capacity development and in its evaluation. A utilization-focused approach to evaluation was adopted to promote the use of evaluation to improve future capacity development and organizational performance. The project was designed and implemented with managers and evaluators in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America.

The ECD Project’s strategy was to involve professionals from ‘pairs’ of organizations in a set of evaluations of their own capacity development efforts. Each pair of organizations consisted of a national organization that was working to develop its own capacity and an international organization that was supporting the capacity development effort. One or more individuals from each of these paired organizations formed an evaluation team.

The ECD Project was designed with the intention that, as teams carried out their evaluations, they would learn about capacity development as well as its evaluation. As the team members represented different organizations, they brought different perspectives to the evaluation effort. It is important to bear in mind that all organizations interact with many other organizations in networks of relationships. So there are, in fact, more than just two relevant perspectives.

Each team focused their evaluation study on questions of immediate interest to their own organizations. The teams engaged key members of their organizations in the evaluation process (more or less successfully, as outlined over the next several chapters), to ensure their support and commitment to implementing the results. The goals of each study, and the methods employed, were all negotiated and decided on jointly by the team members.

A preparatory workshop for the ECD Project was held at ISNAR in the Netherlands in May 2000. It involved people from research and development organizations in Canada, the Netherlands, the Philippines, North America, the UK, and Viet Nam, who had expressed interest in participating in the project. During this workshop, discussions focused on sharpening the objectives and approaches of the ECD Project, on the meaning of ‘organizational capacity development’, and on ways to evaluate it.

Over the next three months, potential participants in international organizations were contacted and invited to take part in the project, along with the colleagues from national organizations with whom they were working. The support and involvement of five donor organizations—the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit

(GTZ), IDRC, and the Swiss Agency For Development and Cooperation (SDC)—was also negotiated during this period.

In September 2000 a planning workshop for the evaluation studies was held at IIRR in the Philippines. This event included a mini training course on evaluating capacity development and group work to develop plans for the proposed evaluation studies.

Between September 2000 and May 2001, six of the seven planned studies were carried out. The seventh study, planned in Zimbabwe, was aborted due to political instability and delays in the capacity development effort.

In each of the six evaluation studies actually carried out, substantial changes were made in the study design after the planning workshop. When the teams prepared their initial plans at IIRR they generally overestimated the time and resources available, and they prepared relatively complex plans. Most of the teams expected to collect information for their studies through formal questionnaire surveys. When they returned to their home organizations, participants found it necessary to simplify their study designs and to negotiate them with the senior managers and staff members on whom they relied for information and support. Visits from members of the ECD Project’s coordination team and project consultants helped get the studies underway, sharpen their objectives, decide on evaluation methods, and negotiate political support for the evaluations.

In 2001, five of the six study teams met for a mid-term review and synthesis workshop at the International Agricultural Center in Wageningen, the Netherlands. At this event, each team presented its study and results, and cross-cutting issues and preliminary conclusions were drawn from group work and discussions. Over the next several months, the individual teams finalized their evaluation studies, with modest support from members of the ECD Project coordination team.

In July 2002, the authors of this book met for a writing workshop at ISNAR’s headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands. They decided on the book’s audience, format, and outline, and prepared drafts for each of the core chapters. A publication committee, comprising three of the authors (Fred Carden, Matilde Somarriba Chang, and Jamie Watts), was established to work with the ECD Project coordination team (Douglas Horton and Nancy Alexaki) in completing and publishing the book.

After the writing workshop, the ECD Project’s coordinating team worked with a professional writer (Kim Brice) and with the publications units of ISNAR, IDRC, and CTA to revise and polish the chapters, summarize the evaluation study reports, and prepare the references and glossary. In December 2002, ISNAR and IDRC had the book externally peer reviewed. After the peer review in January 2003, the Publications Committee met at ISNAR to incorporate suggestions and make final plans for the publication.

The ECD Project’s Guiding Questions

Each of the evaluation studies was designed to respond to questions of direct interest to decision-makers in the organizations involved. Each evaluation team also reflected on five ‘guiding questions’ that were formulated by participants in the project’s planning workshop.

1. What are the key capacities that need to be developed in research and development organizations?

Only recently have efforts begun to focus on assessing the current capacities of organizations and on pinpointing gaps and priorities. Based on studies of capacity development in different organizational settings, the ECD Project sought to uncover patterns and principles that managers could use for identifying their own organization’s capacity needs and priorities.

2. How can managers foster organizational capacity development?

To break the all-too-common haphazard and supply-driven approaches to capacity development, the ECD Project sought to provide guidance to aid managers in managing capacity development processes for their own organizations.

3. How should partnerships for organizational capacity development be built?

Agendas for capacity development more often than not reflect the views and priorities of external agencies rather than those of the organization that is supposedly

being developed. In this project, we have attempted to identify the areas in which external agencies can, in fact, contribute constructively to the development of an organization’s capacities and to identify the roles that the organization itself must play if partnership is to function and produce results.

4. How should organizational capacity development efforts be evaluated?

Evaluation is a new field for many managers, and few evaluation practitioners in the South have benefited from systematic training in this area. The ECD Project participants developed guidelines based on conclusions from the studies to help managers and evaluators answer key questions that arise in preparing for an evaluation.

5. How can evaluation be used to strengthen capacity and improve an organization’s performance?

In a book about evaluating capacity development, this is the most important question of all. In the ECD Project participants’ view, every evaluation of a capacity development effort should itself contribute to the capacity development effort and ultimately to the organization’s performance. However, we know that, in practice, few evaluations are used to achieve these ends. The project participants tried to identify how to make evaluations more useful in an organization’s efforts to improve its capacity and performance.

The Evaluation Studies

The core of the ECD Project’s activities was a set of six evaluations carried out by a group of professionals from 12 organizations, including national and international agricultural research and development organizations, university departments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). They evaluated their own efforts and, in the process, field-tested several different evaluation methods that may be suitable for use on a broader scale.

In the evaluation studies, we have drawn on concepts and methods employed in previous work carried out by ISNAR, IDRC, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and others. An organizational assessment framework developed by Universalia Management Group and IDRC was used to help orient the studies. (This model is presented in Chapter 2.)

Synopses of the Evaluation Reports

This section introduces the six evaluation studies on which this book is based. A more detailed summary of each evaluation report is presented in the Annex.

Exploring capacity development in a rural development NGO in Bangladesh

This evaluation study was carried out by two non-profit NGOs, the Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service (RDRS) and the Philippines-based IIRR. RDRS began to prioritize capacity development when it changed its status from an international NGO, managed by expatriates, to a local NGO, managed by local staff.

Common values and a shared development philosophy served as an important basis for the five-year relationship between RDRS and IIRR. At least 20% of RDRS’s management staff attended IIRR training programs in participatory approaches to rural development. IIRR’s courses helped RDRS develop its ability to innovate and change, to manage itself strategically, to use participatory management methodologies, and to mobilize resources.

These capacities helped RDRS make the successful transition from being a field program of an international charity to a strong, respected, self-administered national NGO. Despite these positive outcomes, RDRS’s informal follow-up procedures and its narrow focus on individual capacity development led to unequal results. Very often knowledge was gained by a staff member and applied to his/her work but never spread to the broader organizational level.

The evaluation study revolved around three major objectives:

1. to determine the relevance of IIRR training courses to RDRS’s capacity needs;
2. to examine the strengths and weaknesses of acquiring needed capacities through IIRR training;
3. to provide recommendations to improve capacity development in both organizations.

The study was guided by three fundamental principles:

1. a focus on information that would be useful to both organizations;
2. receptiveness to reflection and ideas from various levels of staff in each organization;
3. the use of participatory self-assessment.

The evaluation exercise used several methods to obtain data from a variety of sources including small group discussions, RDRS and IIRR self-assessment workshops, surveys among randomly selected IIRR alumni in RDRS and their supervisors, documentation review, and key informant interviews.

The joint evaluation process assisted both RDRS and IIRR in examining organizational capacity development through a negotiated lens, which enabled each organization to have a stake in its outcome. The participatory process fostered greater knowledge and understanding about capacity development and its evaluation among the evaluation participants and led to a greater commitment to addressing organizational capacity development in each organization in the longer term.

Following the study, RDRS and IIRR committed to conducting action plans aimed at improving their respective capacity development initiatives. RDRS planned an organizational assessment where results of the evaluation study would be extensively used as input to the future strengthening of RDRS. RDRS committed to link staff training more systematically to organizational capacity development. IIRR, on the other hand, committed to improving its international training courses by focusing, not just on the development of individual competencies, but also on organizational capacities.

The evaluation convinced both organizations to think more comprehensively about capacity development. Following the evaluation, RDRS introduced a monitoring system of trained staff that will be incorporated into a personnel management information system. RDRS will be rethinking and negotiating partnerships for organizational capacity development in several new areas such as advocacy, networking, and alternative research. The evaluation also inspired RDRS and IIRR to consider their capacity development relationship more creatively in line with their organizational mandates and emerging opportunities. Finally, the evaluation study results were shared widely within both organizations to broaden understanding and foster greater commitment to capacity development and its evaluation.

Towards strategic management in a Cuban agricultural research institute

Since 1996, ISNAR’s New Paradigm Project and the Directorate of Science and Technology of Cuba’s Ministry of Agriculture have collaborated in an evolving set of activities aimed at developing a National System for Agricultural Science, Innovation, and Technology (SINCITA) and strengthening strategic management capacities within that system.

Their collaboration came about as a response to the profound and rapid changes that were taking place in Cuba’s economy due to the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, its main trading partner, and an ongoing United States trade embargo. Cuba recognized that there was an urgent need for major changes in its agricultural research institutions, and, subsequently, a need to evaluate both the process by which that change had taken place and its results.

Initially, the study intended to cover the entire institutional change process in SINCITA. However, subsequent discussions led to the conclusion that it would not be possible to complete such a complex study within the timeframe of the ECD Project and with the resources available. Consequently, the team decided to study a single capacity development effort in a single institute, and focused on agrifood chain analysis in the Swine Research Institute (IIP), one of the 17 institutes that make up SINCITA.

Between 1998 and 2000, IIP staff attended a number of regional and national workshops on agrifood chain analysis organized by the New Paradigm Project, which exposed them to useful new concepts. Most of IIP’s capacity was subsequently developed through ‘learning by doing’. With support from the Ministry of Agriculture, IIP, professionals from partner and client organizations, and other stakeholders organized a series of participatory workshops and studies to gather and analyze information on the pork meat chain. On the basis of this work, they reached consensus on the nature of the chain, its key links and segments, its critical factors, and the implications of their findings for research and development activities.

The work on agrifood chains has been of great value to IIP for three main reasons. First, it helped IIP to understand the changes that were taking place in the swine sector and to define priority areas for its work. Second, as participants prepared the agrifood chain study and set priorities for their research and development work, they gained a new sense of knowledge and direction, which made them more confident in their negotiations with other organizations. Third, the multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional emphasis of the food chain analysis helped participants understand how their individual work related to the overall organization and the interconnections between various technical and institutional factors at different points along the food chain.

The evaluation study focused on the development of capacity for food chain analysis in IIP. It was designed and carried out with the New Paradigm Project to reach consensus on (a) the importance and relevance of the capacity development effort; (b) the key moments in the capacity development process and the principle factors driving and constraining it; (c) the results of the capacity development process within and outside IIP; and (d) the merits of the self-assessment methodology employed.

The study included eight major steps: a preparatory meeting, internal workshops for SINCITA’s facilitation group, an IIP preparatory workshop, document reviews, individual interviews, a self-assessment workshop, a report on the workshop, and the drafting of the evaluation report.

Participants generally felt that the self-assessment approach of the evaluation had a number of advantages over conventional external evaluation methodologies. It brought internal and external actors together to discuss and assess their work, the

guiding questions and facilitation stimulated collective reflection and analysis, and the process led to a commitment to the results. The action-oriented, participatory approach to the evaluation helped stimulate organizational learning and negotiation among the partners.

Based on the positive results of this self-assessment exercise, IIP has introduced self-assessment into its annual work plan and has included resources for this in its budget. SINCITA organized a subsequent self-assessment exercise with another institute. Based on the promising results of these two cases, the Vice Minister of Agriculture requested that SINCITA’s facilitation team organize a system-wide self-assessment to appraise the change process and its results, and to recommend measures to improve the Ministry of Agriculture’s future work in organizational development and change.

Understanding capacity development in a plant genetic resource center in Ghana

The Plant Genetic Resources Center (the Plant Genetic Center) coordinates plant genetic resources-related activities in Ghana. Its activities are fundamental to improving quality of life in Ghana because plant genetic resources are the basis of the food supply and are essential to improving agriculture without threatening the environment. This is especially important given the fact that 70% of Ghana’s population live in rural areas and depend directly or indirectly on agriculture and related activities for their livelihoods.

Two external actors, the Rome-based International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) and the Cotonou-based Genetic Resources Network for West and Central Africa (GRENEWECA), have played an important role in the Center’s capacity development. These organizations came together because of their common interest in plant genetic resources conservation and use and the implementation of an international agreement on plant genetic resources.

The partnership has spanned 20 years and evolved to meet each organization’s changing needs and priorities. Over that time, IPGRI and GRENEWECA’s training, technical, and information support helped the Center develop its infrastructure, strengthen its administrative and technical staff, improve its research methodologies, and increase its engagement with national and international stakeholders. This helped the Center diversify its services and products, which, in turn, has helped attract more financial resources. Greater autonomy from the government has also freed the Center to carry out its mandate and manage its own budgetary resources more effectively.

The purpose of the evaluation was to analyze the development of the Center’s capacity to conserve, evaluate, and utilize plant genetic resources; to learn from Ghana’s capacity development experiences to help develop IPGRI and GRENEWECA’s other national programs in Africa and elsewhere; and to promote the use of evaluation for capacity development and to build skills in conducting these analyses within the three participating organizations.

The evaluation study emphasized the use of self-assessment methodologies. This approach helped the study team examine the complex interactions and processes within their collaboration, explore and address organizational change issues, and analyze their respective organization’s operating environments. The use of participatory approaches in the evaluation study helped build the evaluation team’s capacity to conduct evaluations and to improve their and other participants’ understanding of capacity development concepts and issues. This approach also encouraged them to better understand, value, use, and implement the findings of the evaluation.

The study concluded that the Center’s capacity could be further improved if activities were more centered around its needs and priorities, if management and strategic skills were considered, and a stronger monitoring and evaluation system was put in place. IPGRI and GRENEWECA also need to develop their capacities to perform their goals as capacity development agents more effectively.

The evaluation study was utilized by all participating organizations. In particular, the study report fed into other reviews of IPGRI’s activities in Africa and the findings were incorporated into the development of IPGRI’s new five-year strategic plan for its capacity development activities.

By disseminating the study report to various interested parties in Ghana and elsewhere, the Center was able to raise support to implement the recommendations of the study and to conduct a strategic planning exercise. The study results were also presented at several international conferences, and the final report is being published for distribution to the Center’s stakeholders. This wide dissemination is expected to increase awareness of the importance of the evaluation process and its outcomes.

Assessing organizational change in an agricultural faculty in Nicaragua

Nicaragua’s continuing high levels of poverty have been attributed by some to a lack of use of appropriate frameworks and methods in the environmental and agricultural sectors. Nicaragua’s National Agrarian University (UNA) Faculty of Natural Resources and the Environment (FARENA), which was the focus of this evaluation study, is trying to address this issue by providing an education that is both relevant and practical to the country’s agricultural and forestry sectors. FARENA’s mission is to create pro-

fessionals who can contribute to Nicaragua’s development by generating appropriate technologies for natural resource management.

Originally, the purpose of the evaluation study was to evaluate the contribution of one of its partners, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), to the development of the Faculty’s capacity for integrated natural resources management. During the course of the study, the focus shifted away from the contribution of the international partner to an overall assessment of the Faculty’s capacity to achieve its mission during a four-year period in which critical organizational change took place within the UNA and the Faculty.

During that period, FARENA’s approach to capacity development had focused narrowly on upgrading the department’s teaching, research, and extension skills. The development of enthusiastic leadership, professional staff, appropriate, flexible, and functioning organizational structures, and strong alliances with a variety of national, regional, and international organizations was achieved during that time and had a positive impact on FARENA’s performance.

These improvements were achieved through collaborative projects with several international governmental organizations and NGOs that provided technical support in similar areas of interest and concern (such as CIAT; the Program for Sustainable Agriculture on the Hillsides of Central America; Forest, Trees, and People; the Swedish International Development Agency; and Texas A& M University). The capacity development efforts included joint research, technological and financial support, institutional capacity development, and information exchange.

The study’s specific objectives were (a) to identify the processes by which FARENA accomplished its mission; (b) to analyze the recent changes in the context, motivation, capacity, and performance of FARENA and how these impacted on the organization’s capacity to accomplish its mission; (c) to identify the contributions of external organizations in the organizational development of FARENA and how this impacted on its ability to accomplish its mission; and (d) to identify the capacities FARENA needs to accomplish its mission.

The evaluation study was conducted through a series of participatory and self-assessment workshops with participants from FARENA, other University departments, students, and external partner organizations. Information was cross-checked through a review of relevant documentation available from the Faculty’s archives.

The evaluation study helped FARENA understand how an organizational, rather than a technical, approach to its restructuring and curricula reform processes might have helped it improve its overall performance. Throughout the restructuring process, key organizational capacity issues were neglected. For example, poor strategic planning made it difficult for the Faculty to prioritize what activities to undertake and

when. Its three main functions—teaching, research, and extension—all carried the same weight. A deliberate strategy was also needed to raise the standards of its physical (infrastructure and equipment) and financial resources. The participants of the study now understand that a more holistic approach to capacity development would have been more useful and is required in the future.

The evaluation team concluded that the study helped FARENA understand its capacity development processes and address its organizational performance issues. They made recommendations for action by FARENA and by the University, and suggested how to improve collaboration with external partners.

This study is expected to serve as a reference for other organizations in Nicaragua that work in education, research, and extension and that wish to carry out an evaluation of capacity development efforts. The study was used to prepare FARENA’s subsequent work plan and to design a training program for its academic personnel. The study was also shared with a UNA evaluation team that is conducting an evaluation and accreditation process for a regional project supported by the Inter-American Development Bank.

FARENA proposes to carry out another evaluation in the next two years to evaluate the progress made on the recommendations from this report. The evaluation will also serve to identify improvements in FARENA’s performance and how these have benefited the organization.

Strengthening participatory research capacities in a Philippines root crops research center

The Northern Philippines Root Crops Research and Training Center (the Root Crops Center) is an autonomous public-sector organization, operationally attached to Benguet State University (BSU), mandated to spearhead research, training, and extension on root crops in the northern Philippines. In the late 1980s, the Center began collaborative activities with the Users’ Perspectives with Agricultural Research and Development (UPWARD) network. This is an Asia-wide network of research and development professionals seeking to apply participatory research methods to enhance the contribution of root crops to sustainable agricultural livelihoods, and to help individuals and organizations introduce a participatory dimension to their agricultural research activities.

The Root Crops Center and UPWARD began to collaborate through a research project on sweetpotato-based home gardens in Baguio City. Over the last 12 years, the network has supported capacity development in participatory research in the Root Crops Center through collaborative projects, training, information services, and fa-

cilitating exchanges of expertise. These inputs helped develop a variety of types of capacities spanning the entire process of research planning and implementation, and extending beyond the research realm, by enabling the Center’s staff to teach on university courses and organize training sessions.

Environmental factors (such as the policy and funding environment, organizational autonomy, and natural disasters) and motivational factors (such as organizational change and reorganization, staff homogeneity, and external recognition) influenced the Center’s capacity development and performance in participatory research in both positive and negative ways. Research conducted on home gardens helped the Center contribute significantly to the public- and private-sector response to food shortages in Baguio City resulting from the 1991 earthquake.

The Root Crops Center and UPWARD participated in the ECD Project primarily because of a common interest in evaluation and learning that had arisen from their 12-year partnership. With declining levels of funding and a need to redefine its niche within the country’s broader root crops research system, the Center also intended to use this evaluation to contribute to its internal review and planning processes. UPWARD saw a need to systematically review how its decade-long capacity development efforts have contributed to the organizational development of its partner organizations.

The evaluation primarily used a self-assessment methodology involving Center staff and stakeholders in the design of the evaluation, data collection, and final analysis. The evaluation involved several phases, which included secondary data collection, a planning workshop (to discuss concepts, practices, and issues in capacity development and the ECD Project), key informant interviews, and a summative workshop to present and analyze the data collected. Conclusions were drawn up and limitations of the evaluation were identified. The evaluation report was drafted and finalized through workshops involving evaluation stakeholders.

The evaluation has had a variety of uses and benefits for participating organizations and other stakeholders. The BSU’s administration responded positively to this study by re-affirming its stake in the process and outcomes of the evaluation. In response to a suggestion by the University administration to share the evaluation more widely, the evaluation team organized a series of seminars and workshops aimed at various constituents of the University. This also allowed the team to clarify the nature and purpose of the evaluation in light of various erroneous interpretations of the evaluation’s agenda.

Parallel evaluations have been carried out with other UPWARD partners, drawing from the initial experience of the evaluation with the Root Crops Center. Findings from this study, especially regarding new training needs identified by Center staff,

served as inputs to the development and design of an UPWARD international course on participatory research and development.

Expanding capacities in a rural development institute in Viet Nam

This evaluation focused on Can Tho University’s Mekong Delta Farming Systems Research and Development (R&D) Institute, which was established to enhance sustainable agriculture and rural development inside and outside Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta region. This study also analyzed the capacity development efforts of two Institute-coordinated networks—the Farming Systems Research Network (FSRNET) and the Natural Resource Management Network (NAREMNET). These networks bring together a number of Vietnamese organizations with the objective of developing their professional capabilities in participatory research and community-based natural resource management.

The IDRC Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) program supported both the Mekong Delta Farming Systems R&D Institute and the networks. In Viet Nam’s transition economy, organizational capacities and academic skills in social sciences are particularly limited. As a result, capacity development has been a continuing priority of IDRC’s programs in Viet Nam, which are organized through a mix of networking and research support activities, training workshops, and grants. Together, the Institute and the CBNRM program have tried to encourage the use of methodologies that give a voice to producers in setting agricultural research and development agendas to reverse the country’s predominantly top-down approach to rural development.

CBNRM’s support has helped the Institute develop a set of important organizational capacities that allow it to function as a major research and development organization in Viet Nam. Its strategic leadership, the use and dissemination of innovative research approaches and methodologies, strong personnel management, funding, infrastructure, programs and projects, and networking, both nationally and internationally, have all improved.

The evaluation study aimed to improve, through action research, the understanding of individual and organizational capacity development efforts within the Institute. The study also provided an opportunity to design and try out a variety of tools for monitoring and evaluating these efforts and their results.

The research methodologies included a review of program and project documents and relevant studies, key informant interviews, questionnaires, and a number of participatory tools including self-assessment workshops and participatory workshops. A variety of stakeholders took part in the study, including researchers, extension workers,

government officials, and farmers. A small sub-case study was added on to the main evaluation and focused on the impact of the networks on one of its members, the Institute of Agricultural Science of South Viet Nam (SIAS) in Ho Chi Minh.

This study is only a preliminary step in a wider process of follow-up activities that will allow the Institute to achieve a more precise evaluation of its organizational capacity development efforts by using participatory approaches. The idea is to use the evaluation results to formulate an organizational action plan for the Institute.

The results from this evaluation are to be disseminated to various individuals and organizations inside and outside Can Tho University. The results and findings of the study will be shared and discussed at IDRC, which will continue to collaborate with the Institute on its action planning. After a mid-term review workshop, the Institute’s staff will practice the project approach and methods and use them to identify how to improve capacity development efforts in the future, at both project and organization level.

Guide to Further Reading

This chapter is based on material available on the ECD Project website (www.isnar.cgiar.org/ecd). The site includes the original project document, various workshop reports and progress reports. The website also contains a reference list with links to many references listed in this book, and links to other websites concerned with capacity development and its evaluation.

The website ‘Resource papers in action research’ introduces and compares action research and action learning (www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/actlearne.html). The websites of the organizations participating in the ECD Project are listed in the Annex.

Document(s) 4 of 15