Sustainable Livelihoods Enhancement and Diversification (SLED)

The importance of maintaining this awareness of the poor and their particular needs cannot be over
emphasised. Once implementation of activities begins, it is very easy for facilitators, and the agencies that
they have helped to bring into the community to provide services and support, to focus on the “winners” – the
groups and individuals who will obviously be able to achieve quick results. Often this is at the expense of
those who genuinely need support in order to bring about change. The role of the facilitators should be to
ensure that the groups that are moving more slowly and having greater difficulty receive the support they
need to keep moving, even if they move at a much slower pace than other groups in the community.
3.2 Capacity building
Before starting to implement planned activities, people need to be sure that they have the skills and
knowledge they require to make those activities work and be sustainable.
During the Discovery and Direction Phases of SLED, the team would have encouraged people to identify
their strengths and capacities and used these as a basis for developing visions for the future that are
achievable and realistic and which build on those strengths and capacities. But in order to do something
new, people will often need new skills and new knowledge.
While many groups and individuals involved in the SLED process may have already identified areas of
capacity building as part of their detailed planning of activities during the Direction Phase, others may have
had more difficulty in thinking through the sorts of support they need. This is likely to be particularly true of
the poorer, more marginal and vulnerable groups involved in the process.
These groups are liable to need particular support in identifying and accessing new skills and knowledge
which they do not have but may need in the future. The process of facilitating capacity building by the SLED
team should be concentrated on those groups.
The role of the SLED facilitation team in supporting people to identify their capacity building requirements
should be similar to the role they will have already played in scoping potential for livelihood change during
the Direction Phase. Because the facilitators have different experiences from people in the communities they
are working with, they will often be able to identify important and helpful types of capacity and knowledge
that local people may not be familiar with or even aware of.
When considering the skills, knowledge and capacity that individuals and groups may need to carry out their
activities, consider the following key areas of capacity:
• Management capacity
• Technical skills
• Market knowledge
• Accessing and using information
• Organisational capacity (especially for groups undertaking activities together)
• Informing and influencing capacity (to influence the enabling environment – see below)
Objectives:
• To develop the skills, knowledge and attitude
required to implement livelihood change
• To enable people to make more informed
choices regarding future change
Key skills and knowledge requirements:
• Needs analysis
• Skills and capacity analysis
• Gap analysis – identifying where skills and
capacity are lacking
• Training needs assessment
Process guidance
The following list suggests some of the activities that SLED facilitators might carry out in order to support the
communities, groups and individuals that they work with to develop their capacity:
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