Capacity development has been part of development and increasingly emergency assistance for a long time. In recent years, evaluations presented key success factors to capacity development, including a long-term and flexible endogenous process which works at three levels: the individual, institutions, and the enabling environment. For the humanitarian sector, evaluations further demonstrated the need to bridge the gap with development assistance and the additional challenges of: managing the trade-off between immediate assistance and developing long-term capacities, its complexities, funding mechanisms, transparency and impartiality.
WFP has been committed to capacity development for the past 15 years and the latest Strategic Plan (2006-2009) defines it as to “strengthen the capacity of countries and regions to establish and manage food-assistance and hunger-reduction programmes.” As of mid- 2007, some 75% of WFP operations included capacity development objectives or activities in 71 countries. These operations mainly supported governments (75%) but also contributed to a lesser extent to developing capacities of partners and beneficiaries (40%). The most common areas for capacity development were project management, analysis and assessment, food management, logistics, and supporting decentralisation efforts.
The objective of this evaluation is to determine achievements and shortfalls in WFP’s capacity development work and to learn from these experiences. The evaluation focuses on the quality of the Policy, its implementation and results of operations, and WFP’s capabilities and tools available to implement the Policy. A representative sample of 15 countries was selected for the desk review, of which 5 were visited by evaluation team members.