National Policy on Ethiopian Women (NPEW) is the first national policy formulated in 1993 for
the protection of women’s economic, social, political and human right in Ethiopia. In
implementing this policy different institutional arrangements are established. Even if the
structure of the organizational system for the local governments was placed in the policy since its
formulation, their actual establishment is very recent than that of the regional and federal
government. They lack experience, coordination, sufficient human and physical resource to
discharge their duties effectively. The objective of this paper is to investigate institutional
capacity in implementing the national policy of Ethiopian women in Dilla town. In doing this,
both qualitative and quantitative data were used in order to explore and describe the capacity of
local government in Dilla town.
The study found out that despite the commitment of the government to resolve gender disparity
in all spheres, the government failed to effectively institutionalize the national policy in the local
government in the way that could respond to the women’s need and problem in a localized
manner. As such local governments in the Town have failed to address the problem of women
adequately due to a numbers of capacity challenges and problems in their jurisdiction. The local
governments in Dilla town suffer from limited institutional capacity such as shortage of human
resource, lack of effective leadership, professionals and experts; lack of adequate material
resource such as finance, office equipments and building for permanent office; limited policy
knowledge and understanding, absence of organizational objective, plan, vision, mission and
values especially at grass root level; there is also a limited/absence of coordination and well
established network both among local governments and between the actor and other sectors; lack
of gender disaggregated data in the local governments; limited level of community participation;
lack of institutional experience are among the capacity problems faced by the governments in the
town in discharging their responsibilities. This in turn resulted in poor quality service to the
community in general and women in particular. In order to improve the capacity of the actor in
the town government must consider and reconsider the local levels in the national policy and
establish strong institution at the grass root level to make the service more responsive to the
community