Technical Assistance and Capacity Building in International Development

This rapid literature review has been commissioned as an update to a previous report on technical assistance produced by the K4D programme in 2018 by Hannah Timmis. This report concentrates on technical assistance or capacity building in North Africa. This review found only one comprehensive study on technical assistance published after Timmis (2018) and a few
recent examples of capacity building in North Africa of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In the international development literature, technical assistance initially entailed short term interventions to provide technical skills or research in developing countries. Technical assistanc was largely donor driven and not adapted to the local context (Wilson, 2007). In the 1990sthere was a shift away from technical assistance towards capacity building. Unlike technical assistance, capacity building focused on sustainability as well as obtaining local support for interventions (Tarp & Rosén, 2012). The following development actors engage in capacity building in North Africa. The EU supports capacity building in the security sector in Libya and sponsors public sector institutional building through twinning instruments in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco (European Commission, 2019). Such twinning instruments involve training and mentoring through partnerships in the civil  service between EU member states and countries in North Africa. The EU supports capacity building for environmental protection in Egypt and Morocco. The African Development Bank and the World Bank support capacity building as part of public sector reform in Morocco. Various UN agencies provide capacity building to support post-war reconstruction in Libya (commonpurpose, 2011). UNESCO and the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) promote cultural diversity in Tunisia. The literature suggests that countries in the MENA region welcome linkages with the international development community and are supportive of partnerships with the EU and international organisations such as the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (The World Bank, 2013). Evaluations of capacity building are limited and the literature focuses on the challenges of evaluating these initiatives. Methodological difficulties and time lags are the main difficulties that undermine evaluations of technical assistance and capacity building programmes. The limited evidence suggests that technical assistance has contributed to “islands of excellence” among institutions in recipient countries (Cox & Norrington-Davies, 2019). Thus, there has been
improvement in particular sectors or institutions rather than broad-based gains in capacity.