One of the more innovative approaches to capacity building undertaken by the programme was to institute on-the-job training for personnel in partner organizations such as MuAN and FNCCI. This approach has proven successful in not only building the capacity of the organizations by ensuring that they have internal specialists available for PPP support to service its members, but also in keeping close relations between the programme and the partners. The approach has however also proven to be vulnerable to the sustainability of the capacity-building efforts. One of the persons seconded from one of the partner organizations in Nepal decided to leave the organization, which eventually resulted in a loss of capacity. Secondment should therefore be in parallel to additional capacity building activities of selected staff in the organizations. As a consequence, the programme decided to reemphasize the establishment of PPP desks in the partner organizations, with a broader group of people responsible for PPP support to the members of the partner organization. As mentioned above, these desks will eventually function as support units, which will gradually take over programme activities of providing advice and legal support to the local level stakeholders.
Because of the small budget available for the programme, it put emphasis on building partnerships with other institutions, programmes and donors working in related fields. PPPUE has been utilizing training events and workshops of partner clients as a forum for awareness creation and initial capacity building in the field of PPPUE (partners include FINNIDA/SEAM, GTZ/SEQUA, ADB/UEIP, TDF, MAN, FNSCI).
A prominent part of the programme capacity-building and awareness creation strategy has been to expose programme stakeholders to other PPP cases. Exposure visits were arranged internally to promote knowledge sharing among stakeholders in Nepal as well as externally to neighboring India. The internal exposure visits have proven successful in exposing stakeholders to related challenges and solutions from colleagues whom were at a similar or slightly advanced stage in the process. The external exposure has served as a source of inspiration for the participants and resulted in the initiation of a range of new PPP projects.