Countries are rated how effective they are in human development, governance, and doing business. What if they were rated by their capacity to achieve success in all key areas of their national mission?
Ratings would measure progress in such mission "how-to's" as knowledge sharing, stakeholder participation (especially at the local level), and program results vs. objectives.
The U.N. Development Programme has singled out what it calls major successes in capacity development in 19 nations that included the Least Developed Countries of Laos, Rwanda, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone, Bhutan, Nepal, Mozambique, and Afghanistan. But there's no comprehensive capacity rating of all 49 LDCs, much less all 145 countries classified as developing. Even the UNDP ratings of 19 countries are based only on selected initiatives in those countries.
Mapping capacity -- horizontally across countries all the way from the national to local levels -- would, no question, be a major undertaking. But if public, private, and nonprofit development actors collaborated, especially by mobilizing advances in networking technology, the job would not seem to be insurmountable. Perhaps it could begin with the LDCs and go forward from there.
Multi-layered, continually updated capacity maps could be an important new tool especially for the poorest countries and their development donors in closing stubborn gaps toward achievement of 2015 Millennium Development Goals. The maps could also be a big help to all developing countries and donors in responding to locally diverse impacts of climate change. And that's just for starters.
- The World Region
- Urban Development
- Social Development
- Public Sector and Governance
- Private Sector Development
- Information and Communication Technologies
- Financial Sector
- Culture and Development
- Communities and Human Settlements
- Agriculture and Rural Development
- Climate Change
- Capacity Development