JSI’s Best Practice Benchmarking Approach for Organizational Capacity Assessment

JSI’s best practice benchmarking approach provides a foundation for organizations to strengthen their capacity and plan their journey to self-reliance. JSI has enhanced our successful and much-replicated Organizational Capacity Assessment (OCA) tools and processes into effective online self-assessment models for organizations looking to advance organizational systems and success. 

Our approach is founded on the understanding that discrete performance expectations reduce ambiguity, simplify assessment, and help organizations and funders identify and track progress on specific performance enhancements. 

Drawn from quality assurance approaches to assessing performance against standards, JSI’s best practice benchmarking approach allows for a greater degree of flexibility in their use, improving specificity, reducing time investment, and facilitating performance measurement over time. 

JSI has applied this approach across several projects and tools, integrating it into performance management resources, pre-award assessments, and capacity assessment frameworks. It featured in the USAID SHAREII project’s District and Provincial AIDS Taskforce Performance Assessment and Certification Standards which covered 72 DATFs and 10PATFs, as well as in the USAID TIFA Pre-Award Assessment tools, currently in use with six country entities and may be expanded up to 23 countries. 

Learn more about our work through the Center for Capacity Development at JSI and World Education.