There is a particular way the Global South is often spoken about. Institutions need capacity. Governments need capacity. Small businesses need capacity. Communities need capacity. Professionals need capacity. The prescription that follows is usually familiar: more training, more workshops, more technical assistance, another consultant, another programme. Sometimes those things are necessary, but I have been thinking about a different question: what if the capacity is already there, but the conditions for using it are not?
Across the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America and other parts of the Global South, there are highly trained people working inside systems that do not always allow them to perform at the level of their ability. They may understand what needs to be done but lack the authority to do it. They may have the technical knowledge but not the resources. They may inherit structures that were never designed for the realities they now have to manage. In those situations, the problem is not necessarily that people do not know enough. Sometimes the problem is that the system around them does not work.
A public officer may attend repeated leadership programmes and return to an organisation where every significant decision still has to travel through layers of approval. A small business owner may understand financial management perfectly well but operate in an environment where access to capital remains expensive or unreliable. A government department may have capable professionals but lose institutional knowledge every time experienced staff leave because there is no functioning system for succession or knowledge transfer. A regional institution may know precisely what needs to be done but remain constrained by funding, political arrangements, fragmented authority or the practical difficulties of coordinating across several small states.
Calling all of these things a lack of capacity can obscure more than it explains. It can also place responsibility in the wrong place. When we assume that every performance gap is a knowledge gap, the individual becomes the problem. We train the employee, coach the manager, or send the public officer to another programme. When the same difficulties persist after the training, perhaps the question should change from what else these people need to learn to what is preventing what they already know from becoming action.
That distinction matters particularly in the Global South because many of our institutions operate within histories and structures that were not of our own making. Colonial administrations left behind more than buildings and laws. They left systems of authority, institutional arrangements, economic dependencies and ideas about what a proper organisation or state should look like. In some places, those inherited systems have been adapted successfully. In others, they continue to sit awkwardly alongside local realities.
We sometimes respond to that tension by importing another model, another framework, another best practice or another solution developed somewhere with very different institutions, resources, histories and assumptions. When it does not work as expected, the receiving institution is often described as lacking capacity. Yet there is another possibility: perhaps the intervention itself did not fit the problem, or perhaps the environment did not allow it to take root.
This is why diagnosis matters. Before deciding what should be built, strengthened or taught, we need to understand what is actually constraining performance. Is the problem knowledge, authority, resources, structure, political incentives, technology, coordination, institutional memory, access to specialised expertise, or some combination of them? The answer matters because different problems require different interventions.
This does not mean training has no value. It means training should not become the automatic answer to every organisational or institutional problem. There are times when a genuine knowledge or skills gap exists, and training is exactly what is needed. There are other times when the people involved already understand the work, but the surrounding system prevents that knowledge from being translated into consistent performance.
It also means recognising something that is too easily overlooked: capacity does not always have to sit inside one organisation or one country in order to exist. For small states especially, the ability to access expertise through regional institutions, professional networks, neighbouring countries and shared systems may be just as important as trying to build every capability internally. A country may not need to permanently employ every specialist it might ever require if it can reliably access that expertise when needed. That too is a form of capacity.
This raises a larger question for the Global South. Perhaps capacity building should not only be about adding more skills, programmes and institutions. It should also be about understanding the relationship between people and the systems within which they work, recognising where capability already exists, and identifying what prevents it from being used effectively.
There is value in learning from elsewhere, but there is also value in looking more carefully at what already exists within our own institutions, communities and regions. We may find that some of the problems we have been trying to solve through more training are actually problems of authority, coordination, resources, structure or institutional design. We may also find forms of knowledge and capability that have been overlooked because they do not resemble the models we have been taught to recognise.
Perhaps one of the more useful conversations the Global South can have with itself is not simply about how to build more capacity, but about how to recognise the capacity we already possess, understand what is preventing it from being used, and design institutions that allow it to work. Sometimes the missing piece is not another training programme. It is a system capable of making better use of the people, knowledge and resources already there.
