Imagine a country that is struggling with a poor health care system. Diseases are spreading, and maternal and child mortality is high. What can we do? Provide more money for medicines, equipment and personnel? That alone will not solve the problem. The management and organisation of health facilities must be improved, and their funding placed on a sustainable footing. Training in the health sector must be professionalised. Perhaps the country in question would also like to implement a comprehensive reform of the health sector, with new strategies, laws and standards? And what about health education?

What is needed, then, is expertise and experience – in other words capacities – in a whole range of areas: medicine, law, public financial management, communications, organisational development and training. But that alone is not enough. Lasting results can only be achieved if the activities and strategies in these areas are efficiently coordinated, managed and discussed and agreed with the relevant government, private sector and civil society stakeholders. For a country to be able to help itself in the long term, it must be able to organise such complex processes on its own. For over 30 years one of GTZ's core tasks has been to support people, organisations and societies in developing and emerging countries as they undergo the learning and change processes needed to achieve this. We term this capacity development. Specifically, this entails supporting people in acquiring technical expertise, managerial competence and performance capability. And it means supporting organisations, public institutions and private companies in making their organisational, management and production structures more efficient and effective. A country’s political and social frameworks are crucial in implementing effective reforms. GTZ advises governments on mainstreaming their goals and change processes in laws and strategies, and implementing these country-wide (Scaling-up). Otherwise changes remain isolated occurrences, and fail to generate results beyond the short term.

'Capacity development. Empowering partners, promoting potentials' is our guiding principle for holistic competency development, which GTZ regards as the key to sustainable development.

• Guiding framework Scaling-up
  Orientierung_Scaling-up-de.pdf, 0.37 MB (german)
  Orientierung_Scaling-up-en.pdf, 0.38 MB (english)