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Organizational Development

OBENGBET / Organizational Development

Organizational Development and Sustainability

Organizational and community capacity directly impacts on the quality and results of programmes results. Actions to improve communities occurs in, and through, organizations. Therefore, a strong and effective ECAP as an organisation plays a significant role in community development processes.

Organizational capacity is viewed as the “the combined influence of an organization’s abilities to govern and manage itself, to develop assets and resources, to forge the right community linkages, and to deliver valued services—all combining to meaningfully address its mission.”, Dougherty & Mayer (2003). Building organizational capacity is an ongoing, often complex developmental process: There is no final destination. At its most basic level, organizational capacity building is the process of identifying what organizational capacities to target for strengthening and applying targeted strategies most likely to build those capacities.

In the perspective of continuity of progress and growth, ECAP endeavours to nurture and grow its capacity in all the critical domains of governance, administration, human resources, financial management, organizational management, program management, and project performance management. Organisational development will progressively enhance ECAP’s ability to develop competencies and skills that can make it more effective and achieving sustainable results. ECAP will need to constantly adjust its structure, approaches, and methods as it aligns with the ever-changing community needs, operating environment and position itself well for the new opportunities. In this respect, ECAP endeavours to grow its institutional capacities in the following priority domains:

  • Adaptive capacity to enable it monitor, assess, and respond to internal and external changes”. Key activities to include periodic strategic planning, developing beneficial collaborations, scanning the environment, and assessing organizational performance.
  • Leadership capacity seeks to address the ability of ECAP leadership to inspire, prioritize, make decisions, provide direction, and innovate, all in an effort to achieve the Congregation’s mission. Main activities will include promoting the organization within various stakeholders and setting and communicating organizational priorities.
  • Management capacity – ECAP will ensure resources are developed and applied in the most efficient and effective ways. Key activities may include developing and implement policies that reinforce cultures of prudence in resources use, professionalism, and better controls in the financial management, recruitment processes that ensure the best value services provided by staff and consultants, and volunteers.
  • Technical capacity – ECAP endeavour to have the technical capacity that matches the programmatic needs and functions such as delivery of programs and services, effectively managing organizational finances, leading participatory community processes, conducting evaluation activities, and raising funds. Thus, organizations need to build collaborative capacity to engage effectively with other social change partners to build collective efforts that can really made a difference.

Several factors are vital in the successful design and implementation of organization capacity building efforts. Such efforts include training, peer-to-peer learning, and evaluation, and organizational needs assessment using tools like the organisation capacity assessment (OCA). Common OCA tools assess the institutional strength in the following domains governance, administration, human resources, financial management, organizational management, and program management.