Intermediary organisations capacity analysis: a toolkit for assessing and building capacities for high quality responses to HIV

Building the organisational, HIV technical and policy capacity of civil society organisations is key to planning and delivering high quality responses to HIV. This toolkit provides a range of tools for analysing the capacity of intermediary organisations. It can be used to identify capacity building needs, plan technical and support interventions and monitor and evaluate the impact of capacity building. This toolkit is designed to be flexible and adapted for use to meet the needs of different organisations.

The toolkit is intended to be used by any organisation providing financial and/or technical support to grassroots HIV organisations and is most relevant to established organisations with a track record of grant disbursement and several existing NGO/CBO partners.

The toolkit provides: 

• quantitative methods to determine scores for capacity indicators, and qualitative methods to capture more dynamic issues and perceptions of staff 
  
• self-assessment techniques to encourage better ownership of results 
  
• objective criteria, useful for external evaluations 
  
• multiple instruments for triangulation to develop a comprehensive picture of capacity from different perspectives and assess the level of consensus over issues 
  
• a list of indicators, weighted for importance which can also be used as a basis to design other analysis tools

The authors state that there are also limitations to the toolkit and it is useful only to the extent that users are committed to honest and critical reflection. There are some drawbacks to the group self-assessment process that can bias results such as a reluctance to give low scores or be openly critical or a tendency to agree with the most senior or dominant person in the room.