DOSA (Discussion-Oriented Organizational Self-Assessment) as a tool to measure and build organisational capacity: lessons from the field

DOSA was developed for USAID/PVC to asssess longitudinally its impact on the organisational capacities of Private Voluntary Organisations (PVOs). Although developed exclusively for organisational capacity assessment and data-generation, experience has shown that DOSA also leads to organisational capacity building.

The study addresses three principal questions:

• What specific changes is organisational capacity can be attributed to a PVO's participation in DOSA?
• In which areas and to what degree are PVOs likely to experience changes (both positive and negative) in their DOSA assessment scores?
• What are DOSAs strengths and limitations in promoting organisational capacity development among PVO users?

Major conclusions include:

• focussed discussion leads to capacity development as well as capacity assessment
• diffences of opinion voiced in the DOSA process can be a source of profound learning, growth and change
• once alerted to serious deficiencies in performance through DOSA debriefings PVOs made authentic efforts to improve in those areas identified as weak
• DOSAs create clusters of change and encourages users to establish causal connections among different dimensions therefore allowing PVOs to derive multi-faceted change strategies from DOSA results
• longtitudinal data, or multiple "report cards" create a commitment to change as well as an ability to track the results of change efforts