This toolkit is designed primarily for practitioners who have responsibility for managing relatively large, multi-year organizational capacity building programs on gender equality and women’s rights, involving multiple partners. These practitioners may work in Oxfam or other development NGOs and support capacity building programs with local NGOs and CBOs.
The tools we developed included a Capacity Needs Assessment Tool (CAT) along with participatory tools for ongoing program monitoring of changes in organizational capacity. The tools were constructed in relation to organizational capacity domains outlined in the Oxfam Canada capacity building model (summarized below) and were designed to support transformative organizational change for gender justice.
The objectives of this toolkit are:
- To outline a program management cycle for transformative organizational capacity building on gender justice;
- To provide a set of tools for designing, monitoring and evaluating transformative organizational capacity building on gender justice.
The toolkit can be used independently of the accompanying document Conceptual framework for transformative Organizational capacity building; nonetheless, you may find it helpful to review that document outlining the Oxfam Canada organizational theory of change for gender justice, along with its capacity building model, which provide the foundation for the approach and tools presented here.
While the approach is designed mainly for practitioners managing multi-year, multiple partner capacity building programs, the toolkit is also of relevance to other organizations interested in taking a more systematic approach to organizational capacity building on gender equality and women rights. Oxfam Canada partners have found the capacity needs assessment templates and the monitoring tools very useful in supporting their internal organizational capacity building efforts. Some have picked up and used these tools for their own purposes beyond the Oxfam Canada partnership. For Oxfam Canada, the tools have helped us tremendously in strengthening our ability to design more coherent organizational capacity building programs, which are relevant to partners’ needs, as well as to monitor and evaluate those programs.