I have seen it happen more times than I care to count.
An organization invests months of effort and hundreds of thousands of shillings into developing a five-year strategic plan. Consultants are hired. Workshops are held. Stakeholders are consulted. A beautiful document is printed, bound, and launched with great fanfare.
Then the plan sits on a shelf. Or on a shared drive. Or under a pile of paperwork on the Executive Director’s desk.
Twelve months later, the organization is operating exactly as it always has. The plan is referenced only when a donor asks for it. By year three, no one can remember what the strategic pillars were.
This is not a failure of leadership. It is a failure of process.
The Problem with Traditional Strategic Planning
Most strategic planning follows a predictable pattern. A consultant interviews a handful of senior staff, facilitates a two-day retreat, writes a draft, and delivers a final document. The process is linear, top-down, and disconnected from the daily realities of the organization.
The result is a plan that looks good on paper but feels irrelevant to the people expected to implement it. The research team does not see themselves in the research priorities. The finance team does not understand how the budget aligns with the strategy. The field staff were never asked for their input in the first place.
A strategic plan that lacks ownership is not a strategy. It is a decoration.
A Different Way
At Capacity Watch Africa Consulting (CWAC), we take a fundamentally different approach. We believe that the process of developing a strategy is as important as the document itself.
We do not write strategies for our clients. We facilitate processes that enable our clients to write their own strategies. The strategy belongs to them, not to us.
This means:
- Sub-committees that do the work. We help organizations establish teams to refine specific sections of the strategy after the main workshop. The consultants provide guidance, but the organization leads the content development.
- Consultation that is genuine, not performative. We talk to board members, senior management, frontline staff, partners, donors, and beneficiaries. We use questionnaires, key informant interviews, and focus group discussions to gather honest feedback. We do not just check boxes.
- Workshops that produce decisions, not just discussions. We facilitate structured retreats where participants make concrete choices about priorities, resources, and trade-offs. A strategy that tries to do everything usually accomplishes nothing.
- MEL frameworks that are practical, not academic. We design Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning systems that track what actually matters – and that staff can actually use. A complicated MEL framework is a framework no one will use.
The Evidence
This approach works. Over the past five years, our team has facilitated strategic planning processes for organizations across Africa, including FECCLHA (seven countries), ActionAid International Kenya, GAIN Kenya, Lutheran World Federation, AICCAD, ANDY Kenya, and Safaricom Foundation.
These organizations did not just receive a document. They emerged from the process with greater alignment, clearer priorities, and a shared sense of purpose. Their strategic plans are living documents that guide daily decision-making, not ornaments on a shelf.
Why This Matters for African Organizations
African organizations operate in complex, resource-constrained environments. Donor priorities shift. Political contexts change. Climate shocks disrupt supply chains. A static strategic plan written by external consultants cannot respond to these dynamics.
What African organizations need is not a perfect plan. They need a strategic muscle – the internal capability to assess their context, make choices, adapt to change, and learn from experience. That muscle is built through participatory processes, not imported through polished documents.
Our Commitment
CWAC is a Kenya-based firm, African-led and Africa-focused. We are not flying in consultants from London or Washington who spend two weeks on the continent and presume to understand its complexities. We live here. We work here. Our reputation depends on the success of the organizations we serve.
We exist to enhance the capabilities, results, and sustainable impacts of non-profit organizations across Africa. Strategy development is one tool in our toolkit, alongside organizational capacity assessments, program evaluations, and MEL system design. But strategy is where we start – because without a clear direction, no amount of evaluation or capacity building will get you where you need to go.
Let Us Help You Build a Strategy That Works
If your organization is approaching a strategic planning cycle, we invite you to talk with us. Whether you need a full strategy development process, a mid-term review, or support with your MEL framework, we would be glad to explore how we can add value.
Because your next strategic plan should not end up on a shelf. It should guide your organization toward greater impact, one intentional step at a time.
See you soon.