Capacity Building

When a country, especially one that did not have much to begin with, has been at war for more than twenty years there isn’t a whole lot left for anyone to build on. As one of several NGOs working in this area of the country we do a lot of talking about capacity building. I am not entirely certain I have a great grasp of what exactly we mean when we use that term, “capacity building”, but we like to throw it around the way halleluiahs are used in church.
At its core, I suppose we are referring to our poor attempts to up the standard of living and develop peoples’ life skills. In a broader sense we are also talking about the peace dividends we hope are being reaped by the establishment of proper healthcare and schools. We try to offer basic skills in mechanics and building by offering people jobs who have no expertise in those areas to begin with. This can be painfully frustrating at times as our vehicles are sometimes mishandled and our construction work hampered by bad craftsmanship. An excellent example of this can be seen in the lessons I have learned while trying to get some painting done on a few of our buildings. I quickly learned not to leave the scene for more than an hour, lest I return to find paint of different colors splattered haphazardly everywhere. It has taken several paint jobs, and the work still is not very pretty, but slowly we have trained a crew of guys who are developing into somewhat skilled painters.
The problem we face is the scope of the need. South Sudan has almost no infrastructure, very little healthcare, inadequate schooling and its people have spent twenty years living off of handouts in refugee camps. We are trying to offer services for people who have nothing and it simply is not enough. The government does not yet have the capacity to meet the needs of the people and the NGOs jobs are to fill the gaps left by the government, which in this case means everything. A typical discussion among NGOs in this area goes something like this. UNHCR says, “We have just brought back 5000 Sudanese from refugee camps in Ethiopia and they are without food, schools or healthcare. What are you going to do about it?” Then the rest of us look at each other rather blankly, because we are already stretched thin with what we are doing, and respond, “Um, we don’t have the resources to meet those needs. That is the work of the government. Why aren’t they helping?” What we don’t say is that we think UNHCR was stupid for bringing the people back with no structure in place to begin with, but then again who can blame them for wanting to shut down refugee camps that have been in place for over twenty years.
And so the story goes. We run the only hospital in area as large as New Jersey and it simply is not enough. Imagine living in Newark and trying to walk to Philadelphia through mile after mile of mud during the peak of rainy season so that you can take your child to a hospital or outlying clinic for treatment of malaria…or, as is more likely the case, you simply don’t get treatment and hope the child survives.
We talk about capacity building a lot, and I think it is because it makes us feel a little better about ourselves; it makes us feel like we are actually doing something here, and if we look around I guess we really are…its just not enough. In this entire region there is one secondary school with enough room for less than one hundred pupils...which means we are building capacity on a maximum of a primary education in most cases.
We have a LONG way to go.