Five capabilities

This section discusses the five capabilities that are part of the analytical framework to assess the performance of civil society and the role of the Dutch donors in strengthening these capabilities.

Capability to act and commit

This capability is about an institution's ability to perform its work in a proper manner. This ability is related to leadership, a staff's capacity and motivation, financial security, and the extent to which an institution is able to plan effectively and to turn strategy into operations (Bulte et al. 2015; Keijzer et al. 2011).

Most Congolese CSOs have strong, engaged, committed, yet dominant leaders who are oftentimes among the founding members of an organisation. This was the case for 11 out of 19 organisations in our sample. They are best able to express the organisation's vision and mission, but their dominant positions sometimes leave little room for others to develop themselves: “It is the coordinator who decides,” as a staff member explained during a confidential interview. Contacts with donors generally run through the organisations' leaders. Strong and dominant leaders might risk giving the impression that not so much capacity development is needed, whereas other staff members might be less able to act and commit.

CSOs attribute importance to internal management; in organising General Assemblies, in having regular board meetings, etc. Donors are hardly willing to support such institutional-oriented initiatives as they do not contribute to direct project outputs. Yet, failing to comply with internal organisational requirements can lead to a paralysis of an organisation. This was particularly salient in the case of a CSO that was—for 3 years already—working on organisational reform. Not having board meetings and general assemblies prevented the organisation from making decisions on further restructuring and thus the process kept pending.

Several CSOs tried to set up income generating strategies, but the money collected usually did not rise above symbolic values. The only CSO with significant revenues was a health care provider. It is easier for such an organisation to generate its own income because a concrete service is provided for which costs can be charged. Albeit not very realistic, donors encourage CSOs to seek their own revenues. Almost all CSOs engaged in redistributing project funding to ensure the most optimal payment of salaries. This meant that if project X provided funding for the salary of officer Y but not for officer Z, payment would be divided as long as officer Z's salary was not covered by another project. “We need to do a bit of financial gymnastics,” as one director confided. These gymnastics reduced the transparency of the organisations but at the same time contributed to the continuation of their capability to act.

Overall, Dutch donors contributed to this capability by providing some level of financial security—at least in the short term—to partly cover salary costs, and thus contributed to the motivation of personnel.¹⁰ Donors did not engage in supporting other aspects of this capability.

Capability to deliver on development objectives

The capability to deliver on development objectives is often seen as the most central capability, with the other four capabilities feeding into this one. Basically, it is about being able to deliver what you intend to deliver: What is planned and what is done in reality? How relevant is this for the target group and how sustainable is an intervention? It also leads to the question of work efficiency (Bulte et al. 2015; Keijzer et al. 2011).

The evaluated CSOs carried out a wide range of activities. Most of the projects funded by Dutch donors were close to the core area of expertise of the organisations. The CSOs with a less outspoken thematic focus were more open to shifting their project orientation depending on funding opportunities.

Generally, CSOs report the delivery of planned products and services. It is difficult to verify to what extent this really happens. Planning is usually not adjusted progressively, whereas one would expect such adjustments, especially given the volatility of the context. All CSOs in the east of the Congo had experienced not being able to visit some of their project sites because of insecurity. This clearly impacts the actual realisations, which is accepted by donors as a valid explanation for not realising the intended objectives.

All CSOs are concerned with the sustainability of their organisation, especially of their grassroots structures and they usually aim at strengthening these structures, with or without donor support. There is less focus on strengthening the capacity of office staff and knowledge tends to be concentrated in only a few people. At the moment one of these people leaves, there is no strategy on how to compensate for the loss of knowledge and skills. This happened with one CSO when their only logistics officer left, and with another CSO where a Monitoring & Evaluation officer left. Their departures left voids within these organisations that were not filled up.

Most support that donors provide covers concrete project activities. As such, the donors have a clear contribution to the capability of organisations to deliver on development objectives. But the duration of projects is generally limited, and hardly ever exceeds a two-year term. Towards the end of the funding period 2011-2015, projects tended to become even shorter. Such short terms sit uneasily with achieving development objectives that, by their nature, need a longer-term outlook.

Capability to adapt and self-renew

This capability is about an institution’s ability to adjust to changing circumstances, to learn, and to innovate. It is reflected in the effective use of monitoring and evaluation, openness to learning, and an awareness of contextual factors (Bulte et al. 2015; Keijzer et al. 2011).

A strong donor orientation was visible towards CSOs’ capabilites to adapt and self-renew: Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) data were collected, but primarily to render upward accountability, and systematic data analysis did not take place. A CSO officer explained: “We do monitoring in the field, but not with the appropriate tools. If we had, we could give more relevant information. Secondly, we don't know how to capitalise on the results of monitoring. Maybe because we don't really know how to use the information” (Bulte et al. 2015, 509).

Directions taken in developing new projects and programmes are to a large extent determined by donor prescriptions. In certain cases, this leads to significant shifts in programming, but such shifts are rarely met with the acquisition of new capabilities and donors do little to support such transitions. This was especially problematic for the holistically oriented organisations, as they were the ones most likely to orient their projects towards donor demands but oftentimes lacked the specialised skills to enter into a new field of expertise.

CSOs are generally strongly rooted in the local context through their grassroots structures. Yet knowledge available through these structures hardly feeds into project proposals. More often, context descriptions are put together on the basis of existing documents. A positive exception was an analysis that was carried out jointly by three women's organisations. With the help of an external consultant, these organisations wrote an extensive report based on a survey that they had carried out on the position of women in the Congolese society (SOFIBEF et al. 2013).

With donors becoming more scarce—as confirmed unanimously by our respondents—CSOs put more efforts in finding out which type of projects donors are interested in, rather than in finding out which type of projects beneficiaries would be interested in. Monitoring and evaluation data are primarily used for upward accountability. It can be questioned whether it would not also be a task of a donor to point this out and to demand downward accountability in the set-up of a project. Thus far, this does not seem to be the case.

Capability to relate to external stakeholders

Organisations with a strong capability to relate to external stakeholders are good at building and maintaining networks. Such networks and contacts can consist of donors, state actors, civil society actors, or the private sector. This capability is also about the quality of the contacts that exist within the target group of beneficiaries (Bulte et al. 2015; Keijzer et al. 2011).

Within civil society itself we found several initiatives to exchange knowledge and experiences. Joint activities were mostly undertaken in the field of lobbying and advocacy. This was especially prominent in the agricultural domain and among women's organisations (cf. Hilhorst and Bashwira 2015). Lobby and advocacy efforts towards the state were usually oriented towards the provincial level. Some CSOs did have good entry points at the national level and would participate in nation-wide efforts to change legislation for instance.

In recent years, donors have increasingly invested in setting up synergies between their partner organisations, especially when these partners are working in the same thematic area. In our sample, 10 out of 19 CSOs were involved in such a synergy. For donors, such synergies are advantageous in that they facilitate the organisation of joint training sessions. Moreover, it was argued that NGOs could benefit more from mutual learning through these exchanges, also with an eye on future budget cuts. Efforts hardly resulted in joint programming and CSOs often considered exchanges of little use, whereas donors had high expectations of such synergies. An example of this is a synergy set up by a donor in the field of food security. Coordination of the synergy was with one of the evaluated CSOs, as the donor wanted this CSO to take ownership. The donor defined its own role as that of a ‘strategic advisor'. The raison d'etre of the synergy was explained as: “to learn from each other and to strengthen each other,” which was supposed to increase food security and people's incomes. To promote further collaboration, the donor provided joint contracts to some of its partners, but this did not lead to further exchanges or joint activities. Each partner reported individually to the donor.

Whereas donors encouraged cooperation between their partners, we found a remarkable absence of coordination among the different donors themselves. Indicatively, none of the donor representatives had a full picture of the funding provided by other donors to their partner organisations. With the current focus of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs on lobbying and advocacy, the capability to relate is becoming more important as a lot of lobbying and advocacy activities are undertaken as part of a network.

Capability to achieve coherence

This capability shows the extent to which an institution is able to achieve coherence in its activities, vision, mission, and strategy (Bulte et al. 2015; Keijzer et al. 2011).

Generally, CSOs have elaborate strategic and operational plans in place. In most cases, these plans have been drafted with the assistance of an external consultant and appropriation is limited to the leadership. 6 out of 19 organisations have rather generic strategic plans in which they claim to cover a wide range of themes, based on a holistic approach to development. Three others are also rather general, but do so from a gender perspective. In reality, however, and with funding opportunities decreasing, generic approaches are hardly put in practice and it is difficult to achieve coherence between different projects. Organisations are willing to adjust their project activities to donor demands to the detriment of following their strategic plans. One CSO for instance had formulated a vision that focused specifically on the empowerment of women in different domains (agriculture, education, human rights), but in practice they carried out an agricultural project in which beneficiaries were both men and women. A clear gender component was not discernible, although activities showed some gender-sensitivity; reflected in the participation of women in the executive bodies of their grassroots structures.

In identifying partners for particular projects, donors look for reliable partners, rather than for partners with specific expertise. In one case, the donor's reorganisation urged the Congolese CSO to shift its focus repeatedly. Initially, this CSO was a partner for the donor in the field of gender—with a gender expert as the contact person at the donor's head office, but during various rounds of reorganisation, the CSO was matched with the donor's conflict transformation department, and ultimately with the extractives department. Throughout these shifts, the CSO tried to keep its focus and continued to work as much as possible in the field of its own expertise, but the changes at the donor level inevitably led to changing demands. The donor thus jeopardised the sustainability and coherence of the interventions carried out by the CSO.