Capacity Building Approaches for Cambodia Development

Capacity Building Approaches

for Cambodia's development sector

Often when we talk about capacity building approaches, the obvious one is training. In Cambodia, a lot of trainings were provided to development workers and a lot of resources (people and money) were put into staff training. However, it was observed and confirmed that training has achieved an extension of people's capacity, but not much changes in people’s behaviors, patterns, and practice were shown. People used to state that through training, we get more understanding and knowledge, but often people struggle in turning the knowledge and understanding into actions.

In order to achieve greater impact on people capacity, appropriate approaches need to be considered. It was confirmed that each kind of capacity building approach leads to address a certain of need, and a stand-alone approach will not lead to greater impact. Below are some important approaches with their relevance to the capacity building.

Coaching

In Cambodia, there are different understandings of “coaching” amongst Cambodian development practitioners. While some indicate coaching as training in specific skills to achieve a specific task or performance, others mention coaching as “follow up activity” after a training session to deepen the participants’ understanding of subject taught in the class. Other people define coaching as “training on the job” and other as “field support” to the participants to help them to implement their learning in their work place.

None of the ideas are wrong, but people look from different angles to coaching, and it seems a holistic view of coaching is not covered. Furthermore, the term coaching is used interchangeably with the word “mentoring”, as defined by different people in the world.

To make it work, I would recommend that each organization should define its own working definition of coaching based on its circumstances and needs. It should be more easy to use only one term (only coaching) instead of tow terms (coaching and mentoring).

A good compromise for Cambodian context, coaching can be defined as a learning process between a coach and coachee(s), in which the coach supports the coachee(s) to learn to improve their performance through building personal and professional confidence.

To support the personal and professional development of the coachees, coaching covers a range of activities (depending on the level, experience, and needs of the coachee) as a continuum rather than just focusing on a certain specific one.

In order to become an effective coach, it is questioned about what kinds of skills s/he needs, and what is the most useful between a knowledge on coaching skills and knowledge on subject content. A coach needs definitely coaching skills in order to do the coaching work. It is good if s/he has the subject knowledge in the areas of the coachee’s work, but it is not a must. In Cambodian context, a coach, who has both, coaching skills and subject knowledge, can much increase his or her confidence in coaching. Important coaching skills are for examples:

Coaching process / methods

Deep listening (including paraphrasing, clarifying)

Analytical skills (including bridging ideas)

Questioning skills

Feedback skills

Motivating skills

Observation skills (including reading emotions)

Training

Training is a learning approach, in which the trainer, in consultation with clients, determines the objectives and content, and work to make sure that participants achieve their best learning within those pre-defined objectives. The main purpose of training is to help participants to fill their knowledge gaps or to increase their understanding of certain subject or tool. In a training process, trainers are expected to give inputs (including handouts) to participants in order to stimulate learning. Training is very much effective when the trainers have practical experience in the taught subjects. Training a lone might not lead participants to make a change because main obstacles for change are often not caused by gaps of knowledge.

Facilitation

Facilitation is a learning approach, in which facilitator supports and guides participants to go through a thinking process in order to produce certain outputs desired by the participants. Facilitation is a process oriented learning process, in which the facilitator stimulates participants’ discussion and thinking rather than giving inputs. Facilitation aims at producing an output through discussion, reflection, analysis and well as building consensus amongst participants. Examples of facilitation:

	Facilitation	Possible expected output
	Facilitation of planning process	A plan (e.g. strategic plan)
	Facilitation the development of vision, mission	Statements of vision and mission
	Facilitation of organizational change	Clarified issues; outline of actions
	Facilitation the development of org. values	Org. values or values statements
	Facilitation of a retreat	Depending on the objectives
	Facilitation of team building	Increased team spirit and performance
	Facilitation of a reflection process	An outline of future actions to improve practice

An important skill that facilitator needs in facilitation is “thinking on feet” as we normally don’t know the answers (outcomes) in advance. Furthermore, facilitator needs to learn to trust the process and being able to be flexible all the time in order to help participants to utilize their best “brain” for thinking.

What else?

Actually, there are many other capacity building approaches. However, their nature of activities can fall under one of the above-mentioned categories. Those approaches are for examples:

Role modeling good practice (from a senior person)

Working as a team to support and learn from each other

Assignment and case study

Experience sharing

Exposure visit to best practice

Share working office together

And so on...

It was observed that many Cambodians are not proficient in a second language (English), therefore it is crucial that the learning process should be conducted and discussed in Khmer, otherwise many Cambodians just learn from their head, not from their heart, meaning that no deep learning will take place. Capacity building institutions in Cambodia have shown a lot of successes because they have facilitators to provide capacity building interventions in Khmer, in which language barrier was removed.