Why not just ask? Comparing Self-Assessment of Organizational Capacity to Objective, External Assessment of CSOs serving HIV affected populations in Ethiopia

Background: Civil Society Organizations are essential to the success of health programs, and often require capacity building in low income countries. However, donors and INGOs often dictate the type of capacity building assistance provided, ignoring the input of CSOs themselves. This undermines the move towards country-owned capacity building and removes the stakeholder from the process who arguably has the most to gain or lose - the CSO.

Methods: 44 Ethiopian CSOs providing health services were enrolled in a three year study (2012-14). External organizational development assessments were conducted using an instrument that objectively measures 11 domains and 43 subdomains of organizational capacity using 220 indicators. 32 organizations also completed a self-assessment prior to the first external assessment. Results from the self-assessment were compared to the results from two external assessments.

Results: The domains most frequently identified as a weakness matched the domains identified as priority through the objective assessment: HMIS; Communication; Financial security. The more priority areas an organization correctly identified, the greater their organizational development score increased from 2012 to 2013.

Conclusion: Using the Behavior Change Model, each organization can be classified into the pre-contemplation, contemplation, or preparation stage, based on the correlation of self-assessment results to external assessment results. CSOs in the preparation stage were able to act upon the feedback they received better than those organizations in earlier stages. Clearly some organizations can reliably self-assess in this setting, while others need further external input. However, all organizations should be consulted when designing capacity building inputs.