USAID General Publications Organizational Capacity - An Enhanced Framework
Published: 2021-11-20
Organizational capacity development first emerged as a significant programming focus in the early 1990s. The organizational capacity framework that emerged at that time was modeled after the Western business sector blueprint for organizational effectiveness at the time. 3 Despite the lack of evidence that the capacities in this framework drive organizational performance, it continues to form the basis of the majority of today’s capacity assessment tools. More recently, concerns around issues such as ownership, performance, resilience, and systems thinking have called attention to the outdated contents of this framework. This section concludes that a new organizational capacity framework is needed to support the new era of capacity development support and measurement.