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In June, I attended my first workshop with the Tech4Dev ecosystem. At that point, the conversations were largely about what different organisations were trying to build and where additional support could help them get there.

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A few months later, I found myself back at the same venue for another two days with many of the same organisations.

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The conversations had moved forward.

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We were now talking about what we were actually going to do, what we hoped would change, and how we would know whether we were moving in the right direction.

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The organisations in the room were working on very different problems, but had a common thread underneath all of them: what capability are we actually building?

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That question was at the core of everything and for everyone in the room.

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\n \n \n \n \"Participants\n \n \n
Participants of the Tech4Dev workshop
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Different organisations, similar questions

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The presentations offered very different answers. Some were building technology and AI capabilities, some were strengthening their business development and partnerships, while others were working on leadership, communications or community networks.

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These were not simply plans to do more work. They were, in different ways, attempts to make the organisations themselves stronger and more capable of doing the work.

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And that made me think about the work behind the work.

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The work behind the work

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Most organisations (including us) naturally talk about programmes, the communities served, the technology built or the outcomes created. But there is another layer that is less visible: what allows all of that to continue and grow?

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Can the organisation operate without everything flowing through one person? Can a successful programme become a repeatable model? Can technology actually be adopted by the people who are supposed to use it? Can relationships turn into partnerships, and can experience turn into processes that others can follow?

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These questions don't always make it into an impact report, but they probably have a lot to do with whether an organisation can sustain its work over time.

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One of the things I understood from the workshop was that capacity building is not necessarily about adding more people, buying more technology or running more training programmes. Sometimes it is about creating a system that didn't exist before. Sometimes it is about making an existing capability less dependent on one person. And sometimes it is about giving a team enough clarity and structure to spend less time firefighting and more time thinking about what comes next.

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The guest sessions

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The guest sessions added another dimension to these conversations.

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I particularly enjoyed Sunandan Madan's session on building an institution. The idea of moving from a founder-led organisation towards one that can stand on its own sounds straightforward, but the discussion made it clear how many things sit underneath that transition — leadership, processes, governance, decision-making and, perhaps most importantly, building a second line that can take ownership.

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Vishal Jalan's session on business development was probably the one I found most immediately relevant. Since I am responsible for Business Development and Partnerships at Samanvay, I was listening to it with a very practical question in mind: what can we actually change in the way we approach growth? Thanks to him, I have got a few ideas (that I was looking for) to take back into our own work — particularly around creating more systematic processes for identifying opportunities, building relationships and learning from what works.

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Preetika Agrawal's session on financial resilience was also a useful reminder that finance doesn't have to be viewed only through the lens of reporting and compliance. It can help an organisation understand where problems are, make better decisions, plan ahead and give teams more ownership. For someone thinking about growth and organisational sustainability, that is a useful perspective to carry forward.

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Then it was our turn

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At some point, Arjun decided that I should present Samanvay's plan instead of him.

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I hadn't quite expected that.

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So there I was, presenting our growth plans to a room full of organisations I was still getting to know.

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In retrospect, perhaps this was Arjun's another practical step towards reducing founder dependency. I'm not sure he intended it that way!

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\n \n \n \n \"Presenting\n \n \n
Presenting Samanvay's plan at the workshop
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The presentation was a small moment, but I found myself thinking about how quickly this new ecosystem was starting to feel familiar. A few months earlier, I had mostly been listening and trying to understand the language and context. Now I was standing in front of the room explaining something that I was personally responsible for building.

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That felt different.

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What happens after the support ends?

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This is probably the question we had before the workshop and also something that we carried afterwards too.

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It is relatively easy to measure what happens while there is active support: activities completed, organisations reached, programmes launched. The more interesting question is what changes after that period is over.

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Does the team have a capability that it didn't have before? Has founder dependency reduced? Has technology become easier to adopt? Are new partnerships possible? Has the organisation become better at generating its own resources?

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Perhaps the real measure of capacity building isn't what gets built during the support period. It is what the organisation is able to do differently afterwards.

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That made us look at our own plans at Samanvay differently as well.

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For us, the objective isn't simply to help more NGOs through Avni. We are trying to build a growth and partnerships function with clearer ownership, stronger processes, better pipeline discipline and more systematic outreach, while gradually reducing the dependence on the founder for sales and partnerships.

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The bigger question is whether those capabilities remain after the current period of support is over.

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Still figuring it out

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I don't think I have a neat answer to what makes an organisation strong. I'm still figuring that out and I believe many others are in the same position.

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But after these two days, I am beginning to think that organisational strength has less to do with any single intervention and more to do with the capabilities that accumulate around the work — people who can take ownership, processes that make good work repeatable, relationships that create new possibilities, technology that people actually use, financial discipline that supports better decisions, and leaders who gradually create more space for others to lead.

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Perhaps that is what we hope to build.

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Not just programmes or products, but the capability to keep building.

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