CONTENTS | ANB-BIA HOMEPAGE | WEEKLY NEWS
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Africa |
DEVELOPMENT
NGO’s have increasingly come under fire,
and some people maintain that
with the best intentions,
they at times do more harm than good.
What are
the problems?
Helping nomadic people to become literate is an enormous challenge. Missionaries set up schools for this purpose. But the few who finished school, do not go back to nomadic life but drift off to town. An NGO in northern Uganda had a great idea: train literacy teachers who actually live with the nomads, move round with them and teach them reading and writing under a tree when the cows have come home in the evening. They even had plenty of volunteer teachers. There was only one problem. They offered their teachers three times the salary the government pays and so caused an educational crisis by draining the existing schools of qualified teachers.
There are thousands of NGOs in Kenya working in any conceivable field. They also channel huge amounts of money. In 1998-1999 they dispensed in Kenya Ksh 67 billion, or close to one billion dollars. As donors became aware of the colossal corruption crippling government projects, they tended to channel more and more development money through the private sector. There is no doubt that much good has been done through NGOs often in situations of extreme need. But NGOs have increasingly come under fire, and some people maintain that with the best intentions they at times do more harm than good. What are the problems?
A growth industry
The nineties have been a decade of democratic growth in Africa. Few countries have actually managed to set up functioning multi-party democracies, and the idea of holding on to absolute power till death come dies hard in most presidential heads.
Yet, there is a democratic culture growing and NGOs working for development, women’s promotion and human rights have greatly contributed to it. But with the availability of funds in the private sector, NGOs multiplied, not always for the purest motives.
When ministers and civil servants could no longer get so easily their 10% (or more) cut on government projects, they started their private NGO where money could flow to. And for many intellectuals who found themselves unemployed or in a hard spot, to start an NGO became a way to make a living.
Smart people find out fast what happens to be the latest development fashion and what the donors like to hear, to make money flowing. Unfortunately, as the Bible says: «Where the corpse is, there the vultures gather». Where money flows, corruption grows.
Building up big bureaucracies
Any respectable NGO starts with three essential items: an office, a computer and a Pajero 4W drive. One frequent accusation is that in the end, more money is gobbled up with the running of the office than actually gets down to the people the NGO says it serves. This is not entirely the fault of the NGOs either.
Life in industrialised countries is becoming bureaucratised to a frightening degree. Every penny has to be justified in five copies, and every decision and action documented in great detail. Donors impose their bureaucratic culture on NGOs for fear of abuse, but in the end, too much energy and funds go into administration, and no longer to the purpose for which the NGO was started in the first place.
The underlying illusion is, that the length and language of reports, is proportional to the amount and quality of work done on the ground.
One area where paper work tends to eat up big chunks, are feasibility studies. Foreign experts who write such studies, often with little understanding of local conditions, get huge salaries and allowances. A much publicised example is the Kenya Poverty Eradication Programme. To start, Ksh 140 million go to experts to work out a programme before a penny will go to the poor who are not part of the discussion either.
Disrupting the local economy
Perhaps one of the worst aspects, is the effect of NGO interventions on the local economy. Projects are financed from outside, and often directed by expatriates whose salary scales and expense account are measured on Western standards. A top official of an NGO may get many times the salary of a minister or topic civil servant. The argument is that if you want good people, you have to pay.
The down side is that you create a totally artificial world out of touch with the local condition. NGOs live in Africa, but are really part of the global dollar economy with little or no connection to the local economy.
They can actually distort and disrupt the local economy, push up house rents and prices and make life even harder for the population. They often destroy locally grown institutions which cannot compete with their salary scales and so loose their qualified people. In the end, the international NGO can kill the truly local efforts to built a civil society, but create an artificial structure that will collapse the moment the funds dry up.
Killing initiative
The great motto of all development work has been: To help people to help themselves. The actual policies of many NGOs often have the opposite effect: They make people passive receivers.
The most counter-productive policy has been the introduction of sitting allowances. People are paid to come to a meeting to discuss their problems and needs, often paid handsomely, more than they would earn by working. What is the result? Nobody moves a finger any longer unless they are paid. The community does nothing and just waits for the next seminar. The only people profiting by the system are the organisers who can proudly report to their donors how many people have attended their seminars.
What does it matter, if nothing is happening afterwards. NGOs have actually in some places succeeded in creating a class of people who manage to live nicely, just by moving from Workshop to Workshop and pocketing the sitting allowance.
God help the Church or other groups, which come in with the idea to mobilise people into taking charge of their own lives by their own effort. They have a hard time to undo the damage done.
Little continuity
Calamities attract NGOs like honey the flies. When in 1994, over 2 million Rwandese refugees poured into neighbouring Congo and Tanzania, many NGOs moved in.
Some did heroic work in chaotic conditions and saved many lives. But as the tragedy moved many hearts and made funds available, more organisations came to compete for their share of funds and of publicity.
When the TV cameras were gone and funds dried up, they moved out as fast as they came in. They also run fast, whenever danger looms. Who stays? Some serious organisations with long-term goals and clearly thought-out strategies.
Who stays even longer, is the local Church and the local people who offer first aid before anyone else arrives, and they go on working when everyone else is gone.
But usually they do not employ camera crews to catch their action on video or produce glossy advertisements to tell the world what they do.
Only dialogue can determine people’s true needs
Perhaps the greatest weakness of many NGOs and development organisations is that they came with a fixed agenda.Academics and technicians study the latest development theory and draw up a programme at home. Managers and Public Relations specialists weigh what could be publicised most attractively to Western audiences. Then they come to Africa looking for a place to implement it under the motto: «Take it or leave it».
African governments, Churches and communities smile and nod their heads to the wise men from the West, and then go and use the money for what they think are their real needs. Donors cry foul, stop giving and go elsewhere to make the same mistake all over again. Little has changed in this game over the last decades. Perhaps it has contributed more often to corruption than to development. African leaders and elites, both in the Church and in society, have often shamelessly abused donor money for personal gain instead of community needs. Western donors and NGOs have often imposed their programmes and ideas without respect for the life of local communities.
What is the way out of the dilemma? An open and honest dialogue...which is easy to say but difficult to do.
The Church as NGO?
From the outset, the Churches in Africa have been pioneers in development work. In many places, they were the principle, sometimes the only development agency. Many of the first educational, medical and social institution were the work of the missionaries.
Only later, did governments and more recently NGOs join and at times took over the pioneering development work of the Churches. In the period after independence, Africa had great expectations to catch up with the rest of the world and the Churches, too, got even more involved. Development was the new name for peace. Dioceses set up big development offices and any self-respecting parish run a couple of projects.
Thirty years down the road, with so many NGOs competing with the Churches and with each other in the field, there is need for the Churches to look at the result and ask some hard questions:
There is also the suspicion that all the stress on social and economic development has robbed the Church of its essential mission: to lead people to God. The exodus of so many Catholics to other religious movements and sects in search of spirituality could be a symptom that many in the Church have narrowed the wide vision of God’s kingdom to economic and social concerns.
How to evaluate?
The criticisms levelled against NGOs and at times also against Church projects should push us to evaluate our efforts honestly. If we draw the bottom line to make the balance, the sum will not be all positive or negative, neither for NGOs nor for the Churches.
An enormous amount of good has been done. Lives have been saved and much human suffering has been alleviated. Many people are more aware of their power to effect change and better informed about their rights. There has been a transfer to knowledge and skills to help survive in the modern world. There has been much commitment and sacrifice, at times heroic.
There is also the long list of phoney NGOs and fake projects, of failed projects and «white elephants» and embezzled funds. To judge our projects, we need to ask a simple question: How much of the funds given has really trickled down to the poor and improved their daily lives?
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