Capacity Day 2006

Organizations are the operational building blocks of good government, the primary means for delivering services, and the principal agents of socioeconomic change. For the World Bank and other lenders and donors, organizations are key intermediaries for aid implementation in developing countries. Strengthening organizations is perhaps the most difficult challenge facing developing countries and international agencies—and the results to date have been at best mixed.

Because traditional inputs such as training, equipment, and technical support have often failed to yield expected results, current thinking on developing organizational capacity has highlighted some critical factors outside the organization in the policy and enabling environment. But even within highly dysfunctional settings, some organizations have managed to make major changes in their performance and in turn to help improve the environment in which they operate.

Capacity Day 2006 brought together leading practitioners from the private and public sectors in developed and developing countries to take stock of the lessons learned about how organizations change, learn, improve their performance and help improve the broader institutional and policy environment around them.

	Frannie Léautier Vice President World Bank Institute