Enhancing organizational effectiveness in developing countries: The training and visit system revisited
| Published date | 01 December 1992 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230120503 |
| Date | 01 December 1992 |
| Author | David Hulme |
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, VOL. 12,43345 (1992)
Enhancing organizational effectiveness in developing
countries: the training and visit system revisited
DAVID HULME
Universiry
of
Manchester
SUMMARY
Improving the effectiveness
of
public sector organizations in developing countries has become
a major focus for national governments and foreign aid agencies. This study reviews the
experience of a major organizational reform strategy, the training and visit system of extension,
that has operated for more than
20
years. Several lessons drawn from this experience are
that aid donors must: (i) eschew their preference for organizational blueprints and recognize
the contingent nature of reforms; (ii) recognize that many public sector organizations have
only a small ‘controlled’ decision-making space and thus pay more attention to ‘influenceable’
decision-making opportunities; (iii) acknowledge that machine model approaches are likely to
reinforce the negative aspects of hierarchical control in bureaucracies, and; (iv) pay much more
attention to organizational sustainability in terms
of
finance and strategic management capacity.
INTRODUCTION
Improving the effectiveness of public sector organizations in developing countries
has become a major focus for national governments and the international aid agencies
that provide finance and technical assistance. Increasingly, donors such as the World
Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and bilateral agencies talk of
strengthening public sector management, institutional development and capacity
building. However, much of the discussion about how to achieve these objectives
is presented in very general terms (e.g. clearer authority, greater accountability,
improved systems) and there are few analyses of specific examples
of
major attempts
to improve organizational effectiveness. This paper seeks partly to fill this ‘gap’
by reviewing the experience of a large-scale organizational reform strategy that has
operated for over
20
years and has been adopted in more than
40
developing countries.
This is the ‘training and visit’
(T
and V) system for the management
of
agricultural
extension services. The system has been widely promoted by the World Bank, vindi-
cated as a major step forward for institutional development by the bank’s manage-
ment specialists (Israel,
1987)
and has become the major conceptual force for
organizational change in extension.
The paper commences with a short overview of the nature and tasks of agricultural
extension services in the Third World. It then discusses the evolution
of
the T and
V
system, the management principles on which the system is founded and the results
that have been achieved by organizations adopting the system. The final section
Dr
Hulme
is a Reader at the Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester,
Precinct Centre, Oxford Road, Manchester M13
SQS,
UK.
0271-2075/92/050433-12$11
.oo
0
1992
by John Wiley
&
Sons, Ltd.
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