Capability building: Lessons for city government from emergency relief response
By Ruth Puttick and Fernando Monge
The Public Sector Capabilities Index is focused on identifying where city governments are strong and where certain capabilities need to be built up. Although it has a city government focus, we are keen to learn from parallel sectors and historical examples. Following our recent interview with Shaun Hazeldine, Head of the IFRC Solferino Academy, in this blog we explore lessons from its work to enable humanitarians to find creative solutions to complex challenges.
The Solferino Academy is the “Think and Do Tank” that supports the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Specializing in Innovation, Leadership and Strategic Foresight, the Solferino Academy supports the IFRC’s network of National Societies “to transform and be fit for the challenges and opportunities of the future”.
This is no easy task. Established in1860, the Red Cross and Crescent has developed into a large organisation with complex governance. The IFRC is a global federation body, but it is largely led by national bodies. With 480,000 staff and a budget of around $35 billion, it is distributed, diffuse, and largely autonomous across regions. In many ways, it has similar quirks to governments: large, complex, and bureaucratic, making the example of Solferino Academy’s efforts to foster innovation in the IFRC a relevant learning source for Governments.
What it does
To promote capability building and foster innovation, the Solferino Academy aims to better understand leadership, culture and levers to influence people-based skills and processes in national agencies. It then develops programmes such as Winds of Change to support ethical leadership, inclusive decision-making, and the welfare of staff and volunteers, and launches competitions to solicit interest in capability building and to drive progress and innovation funds that provide grants for problem solving.
The Solferino Academy organise in-person and virtual convenings to bring together diverse groups, bootcamps, and study tours. Recent trips have included leaders from Russian, China, Costa Rica and Iraq visiting Keyna, Spain and China to dive deeply into why certain transformation approaches were taken. The Solferino Academy also manages a mailing list and digital platforms with over 100,000 subscribers, from grassroots volunteers up to Director Generals, and uses strategic communications to build a bigger following and interest to engage those who are trying to drive change to delivering humanitarian approaches.
Through all this work, the Solferino Academy has become a consultation forum, identifying gaps in capabilities and bridging that gap, while bringing in views from volunteers upwards to help drive bottom-up change. As Shaun says:
“Having a connection to the network gives us a particular opportunity, it provides a channel to engage stakeholders for insight, particularly when developing policy at a national level. It has put us in a advantageous position internationally. We can bring voices into policy debates that may otherwise be under-represented”.
What are the impacts?
In Burundi, there was a closing of many disaster relief services and a rapid decline in foreign investment. However, this was turned around. As Shaun Hazeldine said:
“It happened from the ground up. Now they work with volunteers and then work out what they want to do. It has been a story of people and culture”.
As a result, the Red Cross and Crescent in Burundi has been transformed, with 1 in 22 of the residents now a Red Cross volunteer.
In both Ecuador and Uganda, the National Societies have transformed their approaches to engaging young people. Supported by the Solferino Academy, they have been developing initiatives encouraging youth’s ingenuity and passion by offering them direct funding, peer support, coaching and mentoring. This has been a purposeful shift from recruiting youth volunteers to help deliver projects already designed by someone else to putting power in the hands of local youth. This approach has resulted in thousands of innovative projects being implemented and led by young people all over their countries in the last few years, tackling issues such as climate change and food security in their local communities. The initiatives have reached tens of thousands of people and helped the national bodies reframe how they support young people and testing new volunteering models.
Another example is Kenya. The Solferino Academy chose to work with them as they had the leadership in place that were committed to transforming their approaches, a key criterion for a country to be engaged. Shaun Hazeldine said:
“Kenya has made a huge shift over the years from being more reliant on foreign donors to being an organisation that has advanced technology approaches and embraced entrepreneurial and dynamic approaches in their Red Cross branches. And it has paid off. The Kenya Red Cross is the premier charity dealing with challenges in the country”.
What can be learnt?
Drawing on both the impacts, but also the challenges encountered by the Solferino Academy, we can identify key lessons:
- The importance of a dedicated unit for innovative capability building. A dedicated unit within a large organisation ensures responsibility for identifying and gathering knowledge from both internal and from external sources (in IIPP’s work on dynamic capabilities, we call this “sensing”). This unit would then process (what IIP calls the “connecting” capability) and infuse knowledge (the “seize” capability) back into the organisation acting like a “neural network” to keep the organisation at the forefront of innovation (“learning” capability).
- Leadership is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. Without leadership, capability-building efforts may be fruitless. Once leadership is established, other elements need to follow for real transformation to happen, particularly support for middle management.
- Diplomacy is crucial. In large, complex and bureaucratic structures, innovation, and promoting innovation through a dedicated unit, requires a particular attitude — one that doesn’t impose but instead builds relationships diplomatically and gains influence over time.
- Enabling not delivering change. Rather than dictating what change should occur, or trying to deliver hands-on change management, the Solferino Academy has a strategy of enabling local leaders to design, craft and deliver a programme of work that suits them, providing a “smorgasbord of methods to pick from”. This best makes the most of resources available. With a team of 15, with skills in digital, innovation and strategy, based around the world, it would not be possible for the Solferino Academy to deliver hands-on change management.
- To be clear about the transformation sought, but without imposing how to get there. This means supporting local decision making and autonomy. As Shaun Hazeldine says:
“I have never wanted to position the Solferino Academy as knowing everything, instead, we want to bring people together that know things. It is not the Solferino Academy opinions. I don’t want to impose a view or tell people what they should do but help facilitate useful conversations between peers”.
- Governance structures need to change for sustained impacts. Wider systematic change and transformation can only be achieved if the broader governance structures are also transformed (what IIPP calls “transforming” capability). It’s about creating an environment where innovation isn’t just possible but sustainable.
Get involved
If you have lessons to share from capability building inside or outside of government, we’d love to hear from you.
In mid-2025, we will publish our findings on how dynamic capabilities can be assessed and fostered. In doing so, we hope to help city governments and their partners be more intentional and strategic when investing in the right skills and competencies to deliver better services and resident-level impacts.
If you have ideas or feedback, please contact Ruth Puttick, r.puttick@ucl.ac.uk.
