As soon as the spectre of the port development had receded, SAD conducted a series of needs assessments, both within its own organisation and at the community, small business and CBO level. These assessments confirmed that there were many community groups in the region with great potential but also highlighted the following:

• Historically, training programmes in the Toco area had focused primarily on the provision of vocational skills (craft, food and beverage, tour guiding etc.)



• Even when adequately funded, many projects in the area had foundered or proven to be unsustainable beyond the initial funding.



• Few individuals or organisations had the requisite management skills to undertake the implementation of sustainable projects or to manage funding optimally

SAD therefore decided to embark on a programme of Catalytic Capacity Building, a term adopted from Audrey Newman’s April 2001 Report to the Packard Foundation and The Nature Conservancy entitled “Built to Change: Catalytic Capacity Building in Nonprofit Organisations”.

Her definition closely mirrors the approach which SAD had identified as optimal for the Toco area: “highly effective capacity building is about creating an environment that encourages and supports continuous learning and improvement in individuals, organizations, networks, and eventually the communities and societies they seek to change. It is about consciously creating conditions so that each success sparks many others. It is about starting chain reactions for change. That is what I call catalytic capacity-building.”

This approach has been applied both to the Capacity Building within SAD and to its Community Capacity Building initiative.