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USAID's Office
of Food for Peace
Occasional Paper No. 3
Local Capacity Building in Title II Food Security Projects: A Framework
Although food security projects have always included capacity building activities, there is not enough monitoring, evaluation, and documentation of these activities to generate lessons learned and best practices. The USAID Office of Food for Peace's new strategic plan for 2004-08 will give a higher priority to capacity building activities within projects, providing an incentive for cooperating sponsors to more systematically conduct, monitor and evaluate capacity building activities within their projects.
This paper establishes a conceptual framework for local capacity building within food security projects. It is designed to provide Title II policy-makers and cooperating sponsors with a basic reference tool for the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of projects’ capacity building activities at the local level.
This framework builds on the USAID food security framework, in which food availability, access and utilization constitute the three pillars of food security. It focuses on the local level and, therefore, accounts for all actors who work toward food security within a geographic community, such as a district, village or neighborhood. These actors include individuals, households and associations, as well as the local leadership. Each plays a different and useful role in producing community food security. Community food security is the result of their combined activities and efforts.
The framework defines capacity as the ability to productively use one’s asset base to protect and enhance one’s food security. It further defines capacity building as a process by which actors increase their abilities to use their assets and enlarge their asset base, or at least maintain it. This applies at the community level as well, where the asset base includes the pool of public goods and where managers are the community leaders.
The local level capacities that protect and enhance food security, as well as control risks and decrease households’ vulnerability, are divided into two broad types: analytical and managerial capacities and general capacities.
Emphasizing capacity building in community food security projects has some implications for project design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. It affects the nature of beneficiaries, the time at which beneficiaries should be involved in the project, the choice of project activities, the sequence of their implementation and the techniques used in the process.
Monitoring and evaluation of these projects should look at the increments of the asset base at all levels in the community and at the increments of the different actors’ abilities to use their assets productively toward the protection and enhancement of their food security.
Assessing the potential for sustainability of new capacities can include an examination of: (1) the autonomy of the beneficiaries’ performance, (2) the availability of necessary resources over the medium term and the community’s capacity to access them, and (3) the sense of participation, including community support of volunteers who provide services to protect and enhance their community’s food security.
