The aim of the Capacity Building programme is to build the capacity of community based organisations with the goal of ensuring their active participation in policy processes that affect their constituents and safeguarding their sustainability as a sector.
The Forum provides relevant and appropriate training to community based organisations (CBOs) to equip them to deliver quality services and adapt to changing conditions and demands. This includes the offering of workshops and training sessions on various issues faced by The Forum’s different member organisations.
Background
A common feature of the South African development landscape is the prevalence of CBOs providing social welfare services and engaging in developmental work. CBOs are a needs-driven phenomenon; they start and exist due to a set of factors specific to the South African context. These include:
- the historical lack of reach of the more formal civil society organisations;
- limited government service delivery; and
- the spirit of Ubuntu that permeates local culture.
In keeping with the Ubuntu philosophy, people involved in CBOs by and large embark on this kind of service as a means of meeting the human dignity needs of their fellow community members and thus affirming their own dignity.
Grassroots Level
Operating directly within the communities and engaging with service beneficiaries at grassroots level, CBOs hold essential experiential knowledge about the needs and conditions of the communities they serve. The problem is that these organisations often have weak organisational and management structures, no secure funding and rely on volunteer support. These factors limit their effectiveness and prevent them from actively engaging in matters on a more structural level.
There is also a lack of collective efforts, which results in duplication of programmes, uncoordinated initiatives and each organisation fighting its own battle for survival, leaving civil society with a weak and scattered voice in these communities. Many of these CBOs are members of The Forum and their voice is crucial in the policy process for a country with such high levels of structural inequality.
By strengthening organisations’ technical abilities, behaviours, relationships and values, we encourage people, individually and collectively, to play new developmental roles and to adapt to new demands and situations. In a long-term perspective the capacity building work will have a two-fold effect. By building stronger organisations we can improve service delivery at grassroots level as well as provide the organisations with the tools and knowledge to engage in policy processes.
It is only when this voice has strength that we will start to shift the structural inequalities in South Africa.
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