Capacity assessment

Before embarking on the capacity/skills assessments journey, there are two important aspects to take into consideration:

1. Which stage of digital transformation the country in question is at.

2. Which group of people will have their ‘digital’ skills assessed and what are their respective roles in the digital transformation journey.

As part of the preparations for the country implementation journey, it is essential for GovStack, to define the steps below:

• The targeted group to be assessed

• The assessment methodology

• The evaluation process/ criteria

• The different stages of the implementation journey and the respective skills needed at each stage.

When evaluating a country's level of knowledge and readiness, the following key roles have been identified, and have to be evaluated:

Technical teams:

• Agile S/W development approaches

• Cloud hosting

• Security

• Technical support (Help desks and Call centers)

• Open-Source usage

Administrative functions:

• Service definition and cataloguing

• Developing MOU’s for inter agencies cooperation

• Change management

• Process simplification

• Legislations changing to accommodate digital services

Policy and decision makers:

• Strategies setting

• Monitoring and evaluation

• Roadmaps for services implementations

• Prioritization

Interoperability

Shared services

To ensure that there is a solid foundation for informed decision-making and guide strategic planning for capacity building, GovStack uses a rapid assessment tool to facilitate an initial assessment in early stages.

Goal of this tool is to ensure that the digital development training plan aligns with the unique status, requirements and challenges of the government and its ICT practitioners.

This Rapid Assessment Tool is intended to be used as a protocol for focus group discussion with the selected civil servants (ICT Practitioners) from Government Ministries and/Agencies to collect initial data alongside the country kick-off mission or preliminary engagement with country focal points in order develop a digital development training plan for the government ICT practitioners.

As one of the Capacity Building assessment tools, GovStack uses RFI 4 in order to nail our approach.

Goals/Objectives for RFI 4

• Define the recipients and their skills development needs

• Design the appropriate content based on the existing level of knowledge

Finally, it is important to develop a report showing the needs and the skills to be addressed in the country engagement journey

Inventory of the Capacity of staff and technology

Inventory of the staff and technology is also an important part of GovStack's capacity building activities. As a starting point, we have identified various ecosystems and assessment frameworks to help us build a skill matrix.

What is the GovStack Skill Matrix

The skill matrix shows the digital skill in question along with its level of proficiency for each stakeholder and is used to determine capacity-building needs, the topics that should be addressed, and the target group.

The following link leads to an ITU’s publication on digital skills assessment, describing important issues such as methodology, evaluation, and future steps: (ITU, 2020)

The link below shows USAID's approach to evaluate the digital ecosystem: USAID approach

The link below shows the World Bank’s toolkit to assess digital skills: World Bank’s toolkit