Organisational capacity strengthening: why generic training is not enough

Why it’s time to end ineffective, generic training for partners

One of the most common ways to “strengthen the capacity” of local partners is through training sessions, webinars, workshops or short learning courses. On paper, this approach makes sense: organisations need to develop, donors have localisation commitments, and there is often a budget line for capacity strengthening. So, training is organised.

But in practice, there is often a considerable distance between delivering a training session and seeing meaningful change within an organisation.

Over nearly 10 years of professional experience, I have often seen training delivered because “the project requires it”, “an indicator needs to be met” or “there is budget left”, not because it was the best response to a partner’s needs.

People attend, listen, fill in feedback forms, and sometimes even leave satisfied. But does organisational practice really change?

Research by Philanthropy in Ukraine and Socioinform in 2025 captures this tension well. On the one hand, many participants assessed learning programmes positively. On the other, 35% of respondents rated the quality of training as satisfactory or lower, citing abstract content, weak alignment with organisational needs, limited practical value and insufficient adaptation to the local context.

Only 19% of the analysed learning opportunities clearly defined their target audience. This means that most training was offered to a broad range of organisations, despite those organisations differing in experience, needs and internal systems.

In other words, the problem is not training itself. The problem is that training is too often disconnected from the real life of the organisation.

The importance of expert assessment

For World Jewish Relief, this is a familiar reality. Our programme supporting older people works with more than 20 partners across Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Georgia. Each organisation has its own level of development, management culture, fundraising experience, team structure and constraints.

Over the past three years, we have provided training, collected capacity-strengthening requests, discussed needs during visits and calls, and observed recurring gabs in organisational practice. This has helped transfer knowledge and supported alignment with core requirements, but it has not always translated into sustained organisational change.

Of course, organisations know their own context, limitations and priorities best. Their perspective should be the starting point for any capacity-strengthening programme. But alongside this, there is also expert assessment. What we see during visits, document reviews, due diligence processes, conversations with teams, what becomes visible when comparing practices across different organisations. And what a partner may not identify as a need but which still affects programme quality, risk management or long-term sustainability.

Our internal due diligence analysis showed that, for a significant number of partners, the issue was not simply a matter of missing documents, but of deeper structural weaknesses in governance, compliance and financial control.

This finding is important; not because it allows a donor to “catch” a partner making a mistake, but because it helps us to understand where to direct support. If an organisation does not have a policy, the answer is not simply to ask them to write one. The real question is whether the team has the time, expertise, allocated staff and practical understanding needed to make that policy useful in day-to-day work.

This is where the implementation gap appears: the gap between knowing and doing.

Shifting from training to learning and implementation

Philanthropy in Ukraine’s research also found the main barrier to applying knowledge in practice is not a lack of willingness to develop, but a lack of resources: 62% of organisations lacked the funds needed to implement improvements and 56% lack time and human capacity. In addition, 60% of respondents believed that training and mentoring alone are not enough to build NGO capacity. They felt that financial support in the form of institutional development grants has the greatest impact.

Knowledge alone does not create systemic change. If our aim is to improve programme quality, reduce operational and financial risks, strengthen partner sustainability, and ultimately improve support for the people organisations work with, we must move from a training-centred model towards a learning and implementation one.

Four levels of organisational capacity strengthening

In 2026, we changed our approach to partner capacity strengthening entirely. This represents a strategic shift: from donor-monitor to partner-accelerator.

We have done this by dividing partner needs into four levels.

Level 1. Impact-driven learning

This is learning that is designed for practical application. If partners identify monitoring and evaluation as a need, we do not simply organise a general webinar on MEL. We break the topic down into specific components like how to formulate indicators and how to collect data without creating unnecessary burden for the team.

This type of learning should provide not only knowledge, but ready-to-use tools which reach staff throughout the organisation.

Level 2. Expert consultation and mentoring

We offer partners the opportunity to work with experts on specific changes, such as developing a strategic plan, updating policies and aligning internal procedures with donor requirements.

One of the challenges here is encouraging partners to use this specifically for organisational development, rather than to simply gain more knowledge or strengthen programme activities.

Consultations need a clear request system: thematic areas, short pre-consultation forms, defined expected results and follow-up. This makes the support easier to organise and helps us understand what issues partners are really facing.

Level 3. Partner grants

We are now considering providing grants for organisational development, or for piloting ideas and initiatives which have emerged from our observations, assessments and work with partners. In either case, we will not simply be funding an activity; we will be investing in our partner’s ability to work better tomorrow.

Level 4. Peer exchange

This is about creating space for horizontal learning between partners. Often, the best answers do not come from an expert presentation but from a conversation between two organisations that have been through a similar process.

Listening to the “why”

These four approaches form part of our approach to localisation.

We believe that localisation works in both directions. On the one hand, a donor must be ready to listen to partners, create opportunities for them, fund internal development as well as project delivery and adapt requirements to context. While partners must articulate their needs, ask questions, challenge us in difficult conversations, explain where our approaches do not work and offer better solutions.

What I value most in organisational capacity strengthening is hearing the question “Why?”. Why are we asking for this document? Why does this indicator matter? Why do we believe this type of support will be useful? Why is the partner unable to implement something that looks simple on paper?

These questions can be uncomfortable, but they are what make partnership real. They remind us that genuine capacity strengthening is not about a donor arriving with a ready-made solution. It is about both sides working together to find the best way to make an organisation stronger, more sustainable and more useful to the people it exists to serve.