Building Institutional Capacity

 

Many consortium members have a long history of work on conflict sensitivity. Lessons learnt from past attempts to promote conflict sensitivity showed that training in conflict sensitivity tools (eg Do No Harm training) is useful, but is insufficient for effectively and sustainably improving conflict sensitivity. Training alone can prompt valuable individual changes but is vulnerable to staff turnover and therefore unlikely to lead to sustainable institution-wide changes.

 

Building upon past experience, the consortium decided to adopt a proactive approach that goes beyond training in tools, to asking wider questions on:

-         What are the challenges and opportunities for improving conflict sensitivity at an organisational level?

-         What changes would we want to see?

 

These questions prompted the next question: How conflict sensitive are we, and what are the challenges and areas for improvement?

 

To help answer those questions and get a baseline for developing concrete capacity-building plans, the consortium together worked on designing a self-assessment tool to analyse institutional capacities for conflict sensitivity.

 

 

 

Aim 1: We wanted to identify the main constraints and challenges to conflict sensitivity and gain an assessment of our capacity strengths and weaknesses.

 

 

In order to be able to develop agency-specific and joint Consortium plans for raising capacity and addressing impediments to conflict sensitivity.  

 

Aim 2: We wanted to document:

-         what we mean by conflict sensitivity capacity;

-         what are the organisational areas where we most need conflict sensitivity capacity;

-         what are our expectations for different roles;

-         what are our expectations for NGOs more broadly in terms of conflict sensitivity capacity.

 

 

In order to:

-         Be explicit about what is needed to be conflict sensitive;

-         Clarify expectations within the Consortium;

-         Share our learning with other organisations and be able to explain the implications of conflict sensitivity mainstreaming.

 

 

 

The consortium developed a tool, which was then adapted and applied by each organisation in the Consortium. The tool provides guidance as to key questions that need to be asked in order to better understand institutional capacity for conflict sensitivity. Those questions are divided into 7 sections:

 

1. Policies and Strategies

1.A. Conflict Sensitivity Policy

1.B. Mainstreaming into Internal Policies and Strategies

1.C. Ensuring Consistency with External Policies and Strategies

2. Institutional Commitment

2.A. Management Commitment and Leadership

2.B  Enabling Effective Conflict Sensitive Approaches (CSA)

2.C. Responsibility and Accountability Mechanisms

3. Learning and Knowledge Management

3.A. Learning and reflective practice

3.B. Encouraging CSA best practice

4. Integration into Programming

4.A. Integration into PCM

4.B Integration into programme design/start up

4.C Integration into programme monitoring and evaluation

5. Institution-wide CSA Mainstreaming

5.A Commitment to Institution-wide mainstreaming

5.B Mainstreaming into advocacy, communications, campaigning

5.C Mainstreaming CSA into Support services

6. CSA Competencies capacity, skills and understanding of conflict sensitivity

6.A. Staff CSA expectations

6.B. Staff CSA awareness, attitude and behaviours

7. External Relations

7.A. Donors / Funding

7.B. Partners

 

When completing their self-assessment, agencies consolidated their findings and on that basis made their own decisions about which areas were most relevant for their organisation to focus on.

 

 

 

One of the most common questions asked about conflict sensitivity relates to how it looks like in practice. How do we know whether we are being conflict sensitive? This is particularly challenging for staff who are further away from hands-on programme implementation (eg headquarters staff, or staff in finance or HR departments). In order to promote institution-wide improvements in terms of conflict sensitivity, we realised that we needed to develop tailored guidance that is relevant for different roles. We used the self-assessments as an opportunity to start to gather information on what conflict sensitivity looks like in practice for different roles. As an annex to the main assessment tool, the consortium developed a questionnaire to measure staff knowledge and awareness, and to start to map out what conflict sensitivity looks like in practice for different types of jobs.

 

 

General Questions

 

1. What do you understand by the term conflict sensitivity?

2. What implications if any do you think conflict sensitivity has for your role?

3. Do you feel that you need to be conflict sensitive?

4. Do you feel that you are currently conflict sensitive?

5. If yes, can you give some examples?

6. If no, why do you think you are not?

7. Do you currently perform any activities that are consciously conflict sensitive?

8. What actions do you believe you could do to be more conflict sensitive?

9. Are there any impediments to your conflict sensitivity?

10. What needs to happen to build your conflict sensitivity?

11. Any thoughts on how we could improve conflict sensitivity in our organisation generally?

 

This was followed by more in-depth role specific conversations tailored to different job roles. The consortium is moving this work forward by starting to develop guidance for different job roles, to potentially be integrated into HR induction procedures.

 

 

Each consortium agency completed the institutional capacity assessment, and identified areas where they wanted to improve. These ‘change objectives’ for improving conflict sensitivity capacity have been developed by each consortium agency. The change objectives and associated capacity building plans were then screened by 3 criteria:

 

 

For all change objectives / capacity building activities we therefore asked:

-         How will this improve the ability of the NGO to be conflict sensitive?

-         How effectively does this integrate with existing systems/initiatives/activities?

-         How sustainable is this (will additional resources be required to sustain this after the end of the project – how will this be addressed)?

 

All Consortium agencies have then developed and started working on their change objectives. A couple of examples include:

·        Integrating conflict analysis with poverty/vulnerability analysis

·        Developing short practical guidance notes on conflict sensitivity

·        Integrating conflict sensitivity into staff induction

·        Training and mentoring staff to become conflict sensitivity champions

·        Clarification of roles/responsibilities at Senior Management level

 

We look forward to sharing our findings with you in the near future.