 |
|
|
|
|
A report for the Cooperative Venture for Capacity Building
by Kate Roberts and Jeff Coutts
July 2007
RIRDC Publication No 07/063 RIRDC Project No RRE-3A
Executive Summary
What this report is about
This report explores the
‘empowerment’ element of human capacity building and how it can be measured,
monitored and evaluated. The focus is on the contribution of skills of
individuals and concentrates on human rather than social capital.
Who this report targeted
at?
The manual is intended as
a guide for practitioners, funders and evaluators who need to know how
to build capacity and require mechanisms to benchmark and measure related
changes. It contains guidelines and practical tools.
Background
The National Review of Extension/Education
study by Coutts et al (2005) identified a large number of projects across
Australia that used the Group Empowerment/Facilitation Model of extension.
These projects are based on the assumption that people could be taken through
processes to develop their individual and collective capacity to learn
better, make better decisions and become more self-sufficient with regard
to their learning.
Methods used
This manual draws on a range
of principles from the education, instructional design and management literature
on empowerment. Six skills associated with empowerment were isolated as
being the most significant in relation to extension. To provide guidance
on how to measure those skills it was necessary to define each skill, break
it into its elements and identify how each of these skills is developed
or acquired. The elements of each skill provide the link to empowerment.
Having verified how a skill (with its elements) is developed in an individual, the next step was to identify criteria that can be used to establish how those skills could be measured. Here the evaluation literature and the experience of the researchers in this field provided the basis for this aspect of the study.
Key findings
1. Empowerment is closely
related to self-efficacy and has at its core the notion that people have
the ability and the confidence to influence events that affect their lives.
2. There is little direct literature on the measurement of capacity building skills (that lead to empowerment) at an individual level. Much of what is published derives from the economic and business management disciplines and relates to economic gains for corporations and countries.
3. In the context of extension, it was considered that the most important higher level skills are:
This group has been arrived
at by clustering some skills such as critical thinking, problem solving
and time management and including the resolution of conflict under the
category of communication.
4. These six identified skills can be broken into their various indicators.
5. The presence of these skills alone is not the key to discerning whether empowerment has occurred. It is the level at which the skill is used or employed. It is not sufficient for example to comprehend the skill or even to apply it in an unmodified way. Rather it is the ability to synthesise (modify and apply to specific situations) and evaluate the use of the skill that brings about empowerment, because it is at this level that individuals gain mastery of a skill.
6. Having attained the level of skills necessary, the person should have the following attributes of empowerment:
7. The final stage of
manual develops a hierarchy of learning for each skill and suggest tools
that can be used to ascertain if the required skill is present.
Implications
This study focused on the
building of higher order skills for individuals. The extent to which an
individual is empowered clearly varies with the particular context and
not all skills are needed for an individual to be empowered. It also varies
when applied to a group. For example, not all six skills dealt with in
this study will be required for all members of the group for that group
to achieve the level of empowerment considered by them to be necessary
to achieve their own objectives. However, this requires a clear assessment
of what the group’s needs are and the joint skills held by the members.
 
|