Capacity builders focus on their work in a number of different types of initiatives, from short-term maturity and capability assessments and technical training, to providing long-term engagement and advice. These projects often face challenges, which include a lack of awareness of other, existing initiatives, or lack of long-term funding which focuses on short term deliverables. The key challenge is to find effective and efficient approaches that harness available resources to address capacity building needs over the long-term.
Capacity building projects tend to be more effective when they:
enable a long term relationship between the capacity builder and its partner(s);
focus on incident management infrastructure and processes rather than just skills;
build from smaller projects onto larger, more challenging deliverables;
are developed in a multi-stakeholder way; and
focus on interoperability and sustainable impact.