Praxis Note 29. The Serendipity of Capacity Building: A Story from Sri Lanka

When we all started it in the mid-nineties, none of us, including the donors who initiated the process, used the term capacity building — in our case, we did not even know such a term.was being used in the development circuit!

But after a while, as we were doing it, the term somehow crept into our and the donors’ vocabulary. This story is about an initiative of three European donor agencies in the mid-nineties to build the capacity of their partners in Sri Lanka. The story’s emphasis is on the unexpected and complicated events that messed up a straightforward plan devised mainly by the donors and their consultants — and how this straight forward plan metamorphosed into a totally different animal that neither the donors nor we ever dreamed of.