Capacity Building for Inclusive Development
Development projects of different types in SAFE mainly aim to alleviate poverty and ameliorate the livelihoods of local people. One of the strategies commonly used is to focus on communities and build from their existing capacities in order to improve their living standards or try to build new capacities through technology cooperation, to work in a common program. Social and human capitals are two key components of these capacity building efforts and they are crucial to the success of the actions that they accomplish. Both can be considered as part of the social capacity of the local communities or institutions and organization as well. This capacity building means much more than training activities as it includes not only human resource development but also organizational and institutional development. Capacity and capacity building concepts, as well as capacity measurements in this context are explored to build a framework to evaluate the social capacity generated with the interventions and better plan the actions to be undertaken by the projects to succeed. The focus is set on urban, peri-urban and rural development projects.
In these areas, development projects also evolve from an economic perspective that traditionally rely on the ready availability of natural resources, low labor costs, and regulations to recruit businesses to these areas to a broader concept in which factors like capacity and capacity building may be more important for development than the traditional technology transfer system, especially in a global world where resources are becoming scarce and methods and technology of work have changed.
Hence, development strategies lately center on growing entrepreneurs from within the community, basing business development strategies like improving links to more dynamic and profitable markets on the existing core capacities of resident people and firms, as well as on maintaining equilibrium with preservation of resources and way of life. Capacity can be enforced with development projects through training and exposure visits and hands on exposures in order to have a more robust structure and to be adaptive to changes. Support organizations can help local communities in different areas, including: building technical, financial, business, and political skills, building social and institutional capital, upward influence and government capacity-building, facilitating finance, increasing equity and transparency and building linkages and networks. Currently under the capacity building programs of SAFE the following are undertaken
- Technology Transfer in Climate Smart Agriculture for rural marginal smallholders.
- Building capacities in aquafarming and flood resilient hydroponic technology for coastal and disaster prone flood-plain.
- Training and awareness for urban stakeholders on integrated solid waste management (ISWM) towards segregation and source and recycling.
- Financial inclusion program on bank linkages and micro-insurance, market research and resource management.
- Special capacity building on conservation technologies for forest and wetland conservation.
SAFE also encourages in-house capacity building of members and affiliates for enriched delivery and in augmenting human resource potentials of the organization. These are done by international and national organizations of repute like World Bank, WRI, GIZ, BIRD, NAARM-ICAR, IAIA-USA, etc.