Nonprofit, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are key developmental actors, worth over $1 trillion a year globally, with over 19 million paid workers, countless volunteers and the authority to manage funds worth billions of US dollars annually while implementing development aid projects. In 2014, only humanitarian aid sector encompassed some 4,480 operational aid organizations with combined humanitarian expenditures of over $25 billion and roughly 450,000 professional humanitarian aid workers in their ranks.</p><p>NGOs are squeezed between the need to create interlinked programs while delivering coordinated services and the need to conduct after action reviews and data collection to improve future efforts. In other words, it is the social capital of NGOs that plays a crucial role in the efficient and sustainable management of developmental knowledge of NGOs.

Our in-depth interviews and desk analysis reveal that NGOs are in need of both traditional knowledge (technical, general and specialist) and modern management skills (such as project crowdfunding, digital campaigning, project adaptation, etc.) as well as methods of learning (hubs, labs, job shadowing, mentoring, internships, etc.). Lack of resources (talented workforce, expert based partnerships, IT and digital equipment, etc.) has been identified as the most serious obstacle for NGOs to acquire the missing knowledge and skills. Also, failure to transfer the existing individual knowledge and skills to organizational repositories, to transform them into the organizational and network knowledge and make them easily and always accessible to all people in the organization. Most of time this is because NGOs are more proneto ad-hoc (from project to project) than strategic knowledge management practices. Social capital of the organization still has not been recognized as a mechanism through which the existing knowledge may be innovated, the missing acquired, the acquired disseminated and used. NGOs do tend to build teams and create networks and alliances with other similar NGOs; they use the synergy of their project results and knowledge to create space for new project solutions that can be presented to donors.