Title: Factors Associated with the Organizational Capacity of Small and Mid-Size Nonprofits in Tanzania

Program: Public Policy and Administration PhD

Committee Chair: Brian Wampler

Committee: Brian Wampler, Chris Birdsall, Sanghee Park

Abstract: Small and mid-size nonprofits play an important role in addressing persistent development challenges in Tanzania, yet their ability to fulfill this role depends substantially on their organizational capacity. Although nonprofit organizational capacity has received considerable scholarly attention, existing findings about the factors associated with it remain uneven. The importance of particular factors also appears to vary across organizational and institutional contexts. Notably, much of the empirical evidence comes from developed countries, leaving comparatively little known about how small and mid-size nonprofits operating in resource-constrained developing-country contexts develop and sustain organizational capacity. Drawing on the existing literature, financial resources, human resources, formalization, and nonprofit–government relations were identified as factors potentially associated with organizational capacity. Through three complementary articles, this dissertation examines these factors among small and mid-size nonprofits in Tanzania. The dissertation uses a mixed-methods approach that combines longitudinal financial data, survey and organizational data, and qualitative interviews with nonprofit leaders, government officials, and donor representatives. The first article finds that different sources of international funding are associated with nonprofit financial capacity in different ways. The second finds that nonprofits’ access to government-provided capacity-building resources is associated with alignment between their programs and government policy priorities, foreign donor involvement, and their use of nonconfrontational strategies in interactions with the government. The third shows how financial resources, human resources, government-provided resources, and formalization contribute to organizational capacity and how the importance of each varies across nonprofit subsectors and organizational contexts.
Overall, the findings suggest that organizational capacity depends not simply on the resources nonprofits possess, but also on their ability to acquire, combine, and mobilize financial and nonfinancial resources through relationships with government, donors, workers, volunteers, and other actors. By providing systematic evidence from an understudied developing-country context, this dissertation extends nonprofit organizational-capacity research beyond developed-country settings. Practically, the findings may inform nonprofit leaders, funders, and government about factors associated with organizational capacity among small and mid-size nonprofits in Tanzania and similar developing-country contexts.