Practitioner Profile - version 2

PRACTITIONER PROFILE

Jane is the Senior Advisor for Human Resource Development (HRD) in the National Public Administration Institute of a central African country.  The institute is part of the Public Administration Reform division of the President’s office. Jane is the first post holder in this new position that has a broad, and as yet untested, remit.   Jane is in her early 40s and was originally employed as a trainer. Training delivery on different projects helped her gain knowledge and experience about a number of sectors and cross-cutting issues like gender.  She got a Masters degree in human resource management through sponsorship to study in Australia.  Since returning from Australia Jane has held increasingly senior positions and proved herself to be a competent manager, particularly in the area of staff management. This was because, although she loves training, she also likes other methods that she experienced on her study programme, especially action learning, mentoring and coaching. She used these methods with her staff with some success and got the reputation of being a good manager and an innovator because her teams always achieved their goals and targets. When the NPAI created the Senior Advisor for HRD position Jane was hand picked for the position. 

Excited as she is about the new job, Jane isn’t under any illusions that it is going to be easy.  She met a lot of resistance in the past from colleagues who hold on to the idea that training is the best way to build capacity. Even though her new position is high in the public sector staff structure, as an advisor Jane won’t have the power to make things happen, any success will come through advocacy and influence. She knows that at minister level and among some of her colleagues in the NPAI there are people keen to see change and they will support her to introduce new ideas, but the institute has existed for years by delivering training for donor projects and there is a lot of concern about the possible implications of change. Additionally, Jane will mostly be working with the middle managers who have usually put up the most resistance to trying anything new.

Jane has tried to follow the changing trends in capacity development and has some favourite websites that she checks regularly.  She is familiar with the debates about aid effectiveness, harmonisation and alignment, and is interested in the new South-South collaboration that people are talking about.  However she has yet to see how the new ideas can be applied in practice at the level of the initiatives she is concerned with. Jane talks to the NPAI’s two international technical experts, but their focus is on technical subjects and don’t really know much about capacity development.  Like her, they realise that they need to know how to make it work in practice. 

Jane has been tasked with ensuring that an appropriate capacity development approach is built into two big initiatives.  One is a five year agriculture extension project targeting local farmer associations, to be implemented through provincial departments, the National Agriculture Institute, and some NGOs.  The project is building on the systems and achievements of several previous projects funded by the same bi-lateral donor.  The challenge is that training has always been seen as the answer for capacity needs so that is all that is in the draft project LogFrame. Jane knows it is going to take a lot of work before anyone is willing to try some new methods.

The second initiative is a multi-donor project to support the establishment of district councils and the election of the first cohort of councillors, which is the next phase of the national decentralisation programme.  There are many stakeholder groups involved, including a lot of technical experts brought in by donors, some of whom have very different ideas about how to approach the work so the ministry is getting confusing and conflicting advice. This is creating frustration and nervousness all round because so much rests on this phase of the decentralisation process.  Jane understands what some advisors are saying about the need for a strategic approach to capacity development for the new council structure, but she can’t yet see what that will look like in practice and most people are just talking about training the councillors once they have been elected. 

Given the challenges she will face in the NPAI and the ministries, and with other stakeholder groups, Jane sees her needs as two-fold.  Firstly she wants to feel confident that she is really on top of all the current theories about capacity development and the arguments for changing approaches, so that she is able to influence decision makers at both policy and implementation levels. Secondly she wants some really practical ideas and tools to share with managers, trainers and advisors to support them in bringing best practices into their capacity development activities. For both needs she wants some good examples of approaches that have been successful in similar initiatives.