It dawned gradually that knowledge and understanding of purpose and process of public administration and public service delivery among public servants is grossly defficient. Many cannot explain what government establishments are set up to do for citizens and in terms of their own departments, they are often vague and unsure how if at all service is provided to the people.
This gap in knowledge limits absorptive capacity of technical assistance (training and other capacity building interventions) that is provided through development projects.
It leads to questions about what might be done to address this challenge, how best can information be packaged and disseminated to fasttrack learning and understanding in non threatening, non condescending ways. There is certainly nothing wrong with the intellectual capacity of public servants. The problem is the disconnect between what they know and what they are asked to do. Most were not properly inducted and weakened structures within the bureaucracy means that coaching and mentoring is largely absent.
The result is continued decay in the system that capacity building interventions have so far not been able to reverse.
Packaging information in digestible nuggets on attractive platforms that support easy learning (rather than tomes of reports and workshop handouts) to illustrate or support routine workplace activities might be a potential approach?
