The Economist January 29, 2000
Sins of the secular missionaries
Aid and campaign groups, or NGOs, matter more and more in world
affairs. But they are often far from being "non-governmental",
as they claim. And they are not always a force for good
A YOUNG man thrusts his crudely printed calling card at the
visitor. After his name are printed three letters: NGO. "What do you
do?" the visitor asks."I have formed an NGO.""Yes, but what does it
do?""Whatever they want. I am waiting for some funds and then I will
make a project."
Once little more than ragged charities, non-governmental
organisations
(NGOs) are now big business. Somalia, where that exchange took place,
is heaven for them. In large parts of the country, western
governments,
the United Nations and foreign aid agencies cannot work directly; it
is
too dangerous. So outsiders must work through local groups, which
become a powerful source of patronage. "Anybody who's anybody is an
NGO
these days," sighs one UN official.
And not just in Somalia. NGOs now head for crisis zones as fast as
journalists do: a war, a flood, refugees, a dodgy election, even a
world trade conference, will draw them like a honey pot. Last spring,
Tirana, the capital of Albania, was swamped by some 200 groups
intending to help the refugees from Kosovo. In Kosovo itself, the
ground is now thick with foreign groups competing to foster
democracy,
build homes and proffer goods and services. Environmental activists
in
Norway board whaling ships; do-gooders gather for the Chiapas rebels
in
Mexico.
In recent years, such groups have mushroomed. A 1995 UN report on
global governance suggested that nearly 29,000 international NGOs
existed. Domestic ones have grown even faster. By one estimate, there
are now 2m in America alone, most formed in the past 30 years. In
Russia, where almost none existed before the fall of communism, there
are at least 65,000. Dozens are created daily; in Kenya alone, some
240
NGOs are now created every year.
Most of these are minnows; some are whales, with annual incomes of
millions of dollars and a worldwide operation. Some are primarily
helpers, distributing relief where it is needed; some are mainly
campaigners, existing to promote issues deemed important by their
members. The general public tends to see them as uniformly
altruistic,
idealistic and independent. But the term "NGO", like the activities
of
the NGOs themselves, deserves much sharper scrutiny.
Governments' puppets?
The tag "Non-Governmental Organisation" was used first at the
founding
of the UN. It implies that NGOs keep their distance from officialdom;
they do things that governments will not, or cannot, do. In fact,
NGOs
have a great deal to do with governments. Not all of it is healthy.
Take the aid NGOs. A growing share of development spending, emergency
relief and aid transfers passes through them. According to Carol
Lancaster, a former deputy director of USAID, America's development
body, NGOs have become "the most important constituency for the
activities of development aid agencies". Much of the food delivered
by
the World Food Programme, a UN body, in Albania last year was
actually
handed out by NGOs working in the refugee camps. Between 1990 and
1994,
the proportion of the EU's relief aid channelled through NGOs rose
from
47% to 67%. The Red Cross reckons that NGOs now disburse more money
than the World Bank.
And governments are happy to provide that money. Of Oxfam's #98m
($162m) income in 1998, a quarter, #24.1m, was given by the British
government and the EU. World Vision US, which boasts of being the
world's "largest privately funded Christian relief and development
organisation", collected $55m-worth of goods that year from the
American government. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the winner of
last
year's Nobel peace prize, gets 46% of its income from government
sources. Of 120 NGOs which sprang up in Kenya between 1993 and the
end
of 1996, all but nine received all their income from foreign
governments and international bodies. Such official contributions
will
go on, especially if the public gets more stingy. Today's young,
educated and rich give a smaller share of their incomes away than did
-- and do -- their parents.
In Africa, where international help has the greatest influence,
western governments have long been shifting their aid towards NGOs.
America's help, some $711m last year, increasingly goes to approved
organisations, often via USAID. Europe's donors also say that
bilateral
aid should go to NGOs, which are generally more open and efficient
than
governments. For the UN, too, they are now seen as indispensable. The
new head of the UN's Development Programme says the body "will put a
lot more emphasis on relations with NGOs". Most such agencies now
have
hundreds of NGO partners.
So the principal reason for the recent boom in NGOs is that western
governments finance them. This is not a matter of charity, but of
privatisation: many "non-governmental" groups are becoming
contractors
for governments. Governments prefer to pass aid through NGOs because
it
is cheaper, more efficient -- and more at arm's length -- than direct
official aid.
Governments also find NGOs useful in ways that go beyond the
distribution of food and blankets. Some bring back useful
information,
and make it part of their brief to do so. Outfits such as the
International Crisis Group and Global Witness publish detailed and
opinionated reports from places beset by war or other disasters. The
work of Global Witness in Angola is actually paid for by the British
Foreign Office.
Diplomats and governments, as well as other NGOs, journalists and the
public, can make good use of these reports. As the staff of foreign
embassies shrink, and the need to keep abreast of events abroad
increases, governments inevitably turn to private sources of
information. In some benighted parts of the world, sometimes only
NGOs
can nowadays reveal what is going on.
Take, for example, human rights, the business of one of the biggest
of
the campaigning NGOs, Amnesty International. Amnesty has around 1m
members in over 162 countries, and its campaigns against political
repression, in particular against unfair imprisonment, are known
around
the world. The information it gathers is often unavailable from other
sources.
Where western governments' interests match those of campaigning NGOs,
they can form effective alliances. In 1997, a coalition of over 350
NGOs pushed for, and obtained, a treaty against the use of landmines.
The campaign was backed by the usual array of concerned governments
(Canada, the Scandinavians) and won the Nobel peace prize.
NGOs are also interesting and useful to governments because they work
in the midst of conflict. Many were created by wars: the Red Cross
after the Battle of Solferino in 1859, the Save the Children Fund
after
the first world war, MSF after the Biafran war. By being "close to
the
action" some NGOs, perhaps unwittingly, provide good cover for spies
--
a more traditional means by which governments gather information.
In some cases, NGOs are taking over directly from diplomats: not
attempting to help the victims of war, but to end the wars
themselves.
Some try to restrict arms flows, such as Saferworld, which is against
small arms. Others attempt to negotiate ceasefires. The Italian
Catholic lay community of Sant' Egidio helped to end 13 years of
civil
war in Mozambique in 1992. International Alert, a London-based peace
research group, tried the same for Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s.
Last
year, Unicef (a part of the UN) and the Carter Centre, founded by
ex-President Jimmy Carter, brought about a peace deal of sorts
between
Uganda and Sudan. There are now roughly 500 groups registered by the
European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation. "Civil
war demands civil action," say the organisers.
Larger NGOs have pledged not to act as "instruments of government
foreign policy". But at times they are seen as just that. Governments
are more willing to pay groups to deliver humanitarian aid to a war
zone than to deliver it themselves. Last autumn, America's Congress
passed a resolution to deliver food aid to rebels in southern Sudan
via
USAID and sympathetic Christian groups (religious NGOs earn the label
RINGOs, and are found everywhere).
Perhaps the most potent sign of the closeness between NGOs and
governments, aside from their financial links, is the exchange of
personnel. In developing countries, where the civil service is poor,
some governments ask NGOs to help with the paperwork requested by the
World Bank and other international institutions. Politicians, or
their
wives, often have their own local NGOs. In the developed world,
meanwhile, increasing numbers of civil servants take time off to work
for NGOs, and vice versa: Oxfam has former staff members not only in
the British government, but also in the Finance Ministry of Uganda.
This symbiotic relationship with government (earning some groups the
tag GRINGO) may make the governments of developing countries work
better. It may also help aid groups to do their job effectively. But
it
hardly reflects their independence.
NGOS can also stray too close to the corporate world. Some, known to
critics as "business NGOs", deliberately model themselves on, or
depend
greatly on, particular corporations. Bigger ones have commercial
arms,
media departments, aggressive head-hunting methods and a wide array
of
private fund-raising and investment strategies. Smaller ones can be
overwhelmed by philanthropic businesses or their owners: Bill Gates,
the head of Microsoft, gave $25m last year to an NGO that is looking
for a vaccine for AIDS, transforming it overnight from a small group
with a good idea to a powerful one with a lot of money to spend.
The business of helping
In 1997, according to the OECD, NGOs raised $5.5 billion from private
donors. The real figure may well be higher: as leisure, travel and
other industries have grown, so too have charities. In 1995
non-profit
groups (including, but not only, NGOs) provided over 12% of all jobs
in
the Netherlands, 8% in America and 6% in Britain.
Many groups have come to depend on their media presence to help with
fund-raising. This is bringing NGOs their greatest problems. They are
adapting from shoebox outfits, stuffing envelopes and sending off
perhaps one container of medicines, to sophisticated
multi-million-dollar operations. In the now-crowded relief market,
campaigning groups must jostle for attention: increasingly, NGOs
compete and spend a lot of time and money marketing themselves.
Bigger
ones typically spend 10% of their funds on marketing and
fund-raising.
The focus of such NGOs can easily shift from finding solutions and
helping needy recipients to pleasing their donors and winning
television coverage. Events at Goma, in Congo, in 1994 brought this
problem home. Tens of thousands of refugees from Rwanda, who had
flooded into Goma, depended on food and shelter from the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees and from NGOs. Their dramatic plight drew
the
television cameras and, with them, the chance for publicity and huge
donations. A frantic scramble for funds led groups to lie about their
projects. Fearful that the media and then the public might lose
confidence in NGOs, the Red Cross drew up an approved list of NGOs
and
got them to put their names to a ten-point code of conduct,
reproduced
above.
Since then, NGOs have been working hard to improve. More than 70
groups and 142 governments backed the 1995 code of conduct, agreeing
that aid should be delivered "only on a basis of need". "We hold
ourselves accountable to both those we seek to assist and those from
whom we accept resources," they pledged. Yet in Kosovo last year
there
was a similar scramble, with groups pushing to be seen by camera
crews
as they worked. Personnel and resources were even shifted there from
worse wars and refugee crises in Africa.
As they get larger, NGOs are also looking more and more like
businesses themselves. In the past, such groups sought no profits,
paid
low wages -- or none at all -- and employed idealists. Now a whole
class of them, even if not directly backed by businesses, have taken
on
corporate trappings. Known collectively as BINGOs, these groups
manage
funds and employ staff which a medium-sized company would envy. Like
corporations, they attend conferences endlessly. Fund-raisers and
senior staff at such NGOs earn wages comparable to the private
sector.
Some bodies, once registered as charities, now choose to become
non-profit companies or charitable trusts for tax reasons and so that
they can control their spending and programmes more easily. Many big
charities have trading arms, registered as companies. One
manufacturing
company, Tetra Pak, has even considered sponsoring emergency food
delivery as a way to advertise itself. Any neat division between the
corporate and the NGO worlds is long gone. Many NGOs operate as
competitors seeking contracts in the aid market, raising funds with
polished media campaigns and lobbying governments as hard as any
other
business. Governments and UN bodies could now, in theory, ask for
tenders from businesses and NGOs to carry out their programmes. It
seems only a matter of time before this happens. If NGOs are cheap
and
good at delivering food or health care in tough areas, they should
win
the contracts easily.
Good intentions not enough
It could be argued that it does not matter even if NGOs are losing
their independence, becoming just another arm of government or
another
business. GRINGOs and BINGOs, after all, may be more efficient than
the
old sort of charity.
Many do achieve great things: they may represent the last hope for
civilians caught in civil wars, for those imprisoned unfairly and for
millions of desperate refugees. There are many examples of small,
efficient and inspirational groups with great achievements: the best
will employ local people, keep foreign expertise to a minimum,
attempt
precise goals (such as providing clean water) and think deeply about
the long-term impact of their work. Some of these grow into large,
well-run groups.
But there are also problems. NGOs may be assumed to be less
bureaucratic, wasteful or corrupt than governments, but
under-scrutinised groups can suffer from the same chief failing: they
can get into bad ways because they are not accountable to anyone.
Critics also suspect that some aid groups are used to propagate
western
values, as Christian missionaries did in the 19th century. Many NGOs,
lacking any base in the local population and with their money coming
from outside, simply try to impose their ideas without debate. For
example, they often work to promote women's or children's interests
as
defined by western societies, winning funds easily but causing social
disruption on the ground.
Groups that carry out population or birth-control projects are
particularly controversial; some are paid to carry out sterilisation
programmes in the poor parts of the world, because donors in the rich
world consider there are too many people there. Anti-"slavery"
campaigns in Africa, in which western NGOs buy children's freedom for
a
few hundred dollars each, are notorious. Unicef has condemned such
groups, but American NGOs continue to buy slaves -- or people they
consider slaves -- in southern Sudan. Clearly, buying slaves, if that
is what they are, will do little to discourage the practice of
trading
them.
NGOs also get involved in situations where their presence may prolong
or complicate wars, where they end up feeding armies, sheltering
hostages or serving as cover for warring parties. These may be the
unintended consequences of aid delivery, but they also complicate
foreign policy.
Even under calmer conditions, in non-emergency development work, not
all single-interest groups may be the best guarantors of long-term
success. They are rarely obliged to think about trade-offs in policy
or
to consider broad, cross-sector approaches to development. NGOs are
"often organised to promote particular goals...rather than the
broader
goal of development," argues Ms Lancaster. In Kosovo last spring,
"many
governments made bilateral funding agreements with NGOs, greatly
undermining UNHCR's ability to prioritise programmes or monitor
efficiency," says Peter Morris of MSF. This spring in Kosovo, "there
were instances of several NGOs competing to work in the same camps,
duplication of essential services," complains an Oxfam worker. And
whatever big international NGOs do in the developing world, they
bring
in western living standards, personnel and purchasing power which can
transform local markets and generate great local resentment. In
troubled zones where foreign NGOs flourish, weekends bring a line of
smart four-by-fours parked at the best beaches, restaurants or
nightclubs. The local beggars do well, but discrepancies between
expatriate staff and, say, impoverished local officials trying to do
the same work can cause deep antipathy. Not only have NGOs diverted
funds away from local governments, but they are often seen as
directly
challenging their sovereignty.
NGOs can also become self-perpetuating. When the problem for which
they
were founded is solved, they seek new campaigns and new funds. The
old
anti-apartheid movement, its job completed, did not disband, but
instead became another lobby group for southern Africa. As NGOs
become
steadily more powerful on the world scene, the best antidote to
hubris,
and to institutionalisation, would be this: disband when the job is
done. The chief aim of NGOs should be their own abolition.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Sins of the secular missionaries
Aid and campaign groups, or NGOs, matter more and more in world
affairs. But they are often far from being "non-governmental",
as they claim. And they are not always a force for good
A YOUNG man thrusts his crudely printed calling card at the
visitor. After his name are printed three letters: NGO. "What do you
do?" the visitor asks."I have formed an NGO.""Yes, but what does it
do?""Whatever they want. I am waiting for some funds and then I will
make a project."
Once little more than ragged charities, non-governmental
organisations
(NGOs) are now big business. Somalia, where that exchange took place,
is heaven for them. In large parts of the country, western
governments,
the United Nations and foreign aid agencies cannot work directly; it
is
too dangerous. So outsiders must work through local groups, which
become a powerful source of patronage. "Anybody who's anybody is an
NGO
these days," sighs one UN official.
And not just in Somalia. NGOs now head for crisis zones as fast as
journalists do: a war, a flood, refugees, a dodgy election, even a
world trade conference, will draw them like a honey pot. Last spring,
Tirana, the capital of Albania, was swamped by some 200 groups
intending to help the refugees from Kosovo. In Kosovo itself, the
ground is now thick with foreign groups competing to foster
democracy,
build homes and proffer goods and services. Environmental activists
in
Norway board whaling ships; do-gooders gather for the Chiapas rebels
in
Mexico.
In recent years, such groups have mushroomed. A 1995 UN report on
global governance suggested that nearly 29,000 international NGOs
existed. Domestic ones have grown even faster. By one estimate, there
are now 2m in America alone, most formed in the past 30 years. In
Russia, where almost none existed before the fall of communism, there
are at least 65,000. Dozens are created daily; in Kenya alone, some
240
NGOs are now created every year.
Most of these are minnows; some are whales, with annual incomes of
millions of dollars and a worldwide operation. Some are primarily
helpers, distributing relief where it is needed; some are mainly
campaigners, existing to promote issues deemed important by their
members. The general public tends to see them as uniformly
altruistic,
idealistic and independent. But the term "NGO", like the activities
of
the NGOs themselves, deserves much sharper scrutiny.
Governments' puppets?
The tag "Non-Governmental Organisation" was used first at the
founding
of the UN. It implies that NGOs keep their distance from officialdom;
they do things that governments will not, or cannot, do. In fact,
NGOs
have a great deal to do with governments. Not all of it is healthy.
Take the aid NGOs. A growing share of development spending, emergency
relief and aid transfers passes through them. According to Carol
Lancaster, a former deputy director of USAID, America's development
body, NGOs have become "the most important constituency for the
activities of development aid agencies". Much of the food delivered
by
the World Food Programme, a UN body, in Albania last year was
actually
handed out by NGOs working in the refugee camps. Between 1990 and
1994,
the proportion of the EU's relief aid channelled through NGOs rose
from
47% to 67%. The Red Cross reckons that NGOs now disburse more money
than the World Bank.
And governments are happy to provide that money. Of Oxfam's #98m
($162m) income in 1998, a quarter, #24.1m, was given by the British
government and the EU. World Vision US, which boasts of being the
world's "largest privately funded Christian relief and development
organisation", collected $55m-worth of goods that year from the
American government. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the winner of
last
year's Nobel peace prize, gets 46% of its income from government
sources. Of 120 NGOs which sprang up in Kenya between 1993 and the
end
of 1996, all but nine received all their income from foreign
governments and international bodies. Such official contributions
will
go on, especially if the public gets more stingy. Today's young,
educated and rich give a smaller share of their incomes away than did
-- and do -- their parents.
In Africa, where international help has the greatest influence,
western governments have long been shifting their aid towards NGOs.
America's help, some $711m last year, increasingly goes to approved
organisations, often via USAID. Europe's donors also say that
bilateral
aid should go to NGOs, which are generally more open and efficient
than
governments. For the UN, too, they are now seen as indispensable. The
new head of the UN's Development Programme says the body "will put a
lot more emphasis on relations with NGOs". Most such agencies now
have
hundreds of NGO partners.
So the principal reason for the recent boom in NGOs is that western
governments finance them. This is not a matter of charity, but of
privatisation: many "non-governmental" groups are becoming
contractors
for governments. Governments prefer to pass aid through NGOs because
it
is cheaper, more efficient -- and more at arm's length -- than direct
official aid.
Governments also find NGOs useful in ways that go beyond the
distribution of food and blankets. Some bring back useful
information,
and make it part of their brief to do so. Outfits such as the
International Crisis Group and Global Witness publish detailed and
opinionated reports from places beset by war or other disasters. The
work of Global Witness in Angola is actually paid for by the British
Foreign Office.
Diplomats and governments, as well as other NGOs, journalists and the
public, can make good use of these reports. As the staff of foreign
embassies shrink, and the need to keep abreast of events abroad
increases, governments inevitably turn to private sources of
information. In some benighted parts of the world, sometimes only
NGOs
can nowadays reveal what is going on.
Take, for example, human rights, the business of one of the biggest
of
the campaigning NGOs, Amnesty International. Amnesty has around 1m
members in over 162 countries, and its campaigns against political
repression, in particular against unfair imprisonment, are known
around
the world. The information it gathers is often unavailable from other
sources.
Where western governments' interests match those of campaigning NGOs,
they can form effective alliances. In 1997, a coalition of over 350
NGOs pushed for, and obtained, a treaty against the use of landmines.
The campaign was backed by the usual array of concerned governments
(Canada, the Scandinavians) and won the Nobel peace prize.
NGOs are also interesting and useful to governments because they work
in the midst of conflict. Many were created by wars: the Red Cross
after the Battle of Solferino in 1859, the Save the Children Fund
after
the first world war, MSF after the Biafran war. By being "close to
the
action" some NGOs, perhaps unwittingly, provide good cover for spies
--
a more traditional means by which governments gather information.
In some cases, NGOs are taking over directly from diplomats: not
attempting to help the victims of war, but to end the wars
themselves.
Some try to restrict arms flows, such as Saferworld, which is against
small arms. Others attempt to negotiate ceasefires. The Italian
Catholic lay community of Sant' Egidio helped to end 13 years of
civil
war in Mozambique in 1992. International Alert, a London-based peace
research group, tried the same for Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s.
Last
year, Unicef (a part of the UN) and the Carter Centre, founded by
ex-President Jimmy Carter, brought about a peace deal of sorts
between
Uganda and Sudan. There are now roughly 500 groups registered by the
European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation. "Civil
war demands civil action," say the organisers.
Larger NGOs have pledged not to act as "instruments of government
foreign policy". But at times they are seen as just that. Governments
are more willing to pay groups to deliver humanitarian aid to a war
zone than to deliver it themselves. Last autumn, America's Congress
passed a resolution to deliver food aid to rebels in southern Sudan
via
USAID and sympathetic Christian groups (religious NGOs earn the label
RINGOs, and are found everywhere).
Perhaps the most potent sign of the closeness between NGOs and
governments, aside from their financial links, is the exchange of
personnel. In developing countries, where the civil service is poor,
some governments ask NGOs to help with the paperwork requested by the
World Bank and other international institutions. Politicians, or
their
wives, often have their own local NGOs. In the developed world,
meanwhile, increasing numbers of civil servants take time off to work
for NGOs, and vice versa: Oxfam has former staff members not only in
the British government, but also in the Finance Ministry of Uganda.
This symbiotic relationship with government (earning some groups the
tag GRINGO) may make the governments of developing countries work
better. It may also help aid groups to do their job effectively. But
it
hardly reflects their independence.
NGOS can also stray too close to the corporate world. Some, known to
critics as "business NGOs", deliberately model themselves on, or
depend
greatly on, particular corporations. Bigger ones have commercial
arms,
media departments, aggressive head-hunting methods and a wide array
of
private fund-raising and investment strategies. Smaller ones can be
overwhelmed by philanthropic businesses or their owners: Bill Gates,
the head of Microsoft, gave $25m last year to an NGO that is looking
for a vaccine for AIDS, transforming it overnight from a small group
with a good idea to a powerful one with a lot of money to spend.
The business of helping
In 1997, according to the OECD, NGOs raised $5.5 billion from private
donors. The real figure may well be higher: as leisure, travel and
other industries have grown, so too have charities. In 1995
non-profit
groups (including, but not only, NGOs) provided over 12% of all jobs
in
the Netherlands, 8% in America and 6% in Britain.
Many groups have come to depend on their media presence to help with
fund-raising. This is bringing NGOs their greatest problems. They are
adapting from shoebox outfits, stuffing envelopes and sending off
perhaps one container of medicines, to sophisticated
multi-million-dollar operations. In the now-crowded relief market,
campaigning groups must jostle for attention: increasingly, NGOs
compete and spend a lot of time and money marketing themselves.
Bigger
ones typically spend 10% of their funds on marketing and
fund-raising.
The focus of such NGOs can easily shift from finding solutions and
helping needy recipients to pleasing their donors and winning
television coverage. Events at Goma, in Congo, in 1994 brought this
problem home. Tens of thousands of refugees from Rwanda, who had
flooded into Goma, depended on food and shelter from the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees and from NGOs. Their dramatic plight drew
the
television cameras and, with them, the chance for publicity and huge
donations. A frantic scramble for funds led groups to lie about their
projects. Fearful that the media and then the public might lose
confidence in NGOs, the Red Cross drew up an approved list of NGOs
and
got them to put their names to a ten-point code of conduct,
reproduced
above.
Since then, NGOs have been working hard to improve. More than 70
groups and 142 governments backed the 1995 code of conduct, agreeing
that aid should be delivered "only on a basis of need". "We hold
ourselves accountable to both those we seek to assist and those from
whom we accept resources," they pledged. Yet in Kosovo last year
there
was a similar scramble, with groups pushing to be seen by camera
crews
as they worked. Personnel and resources were even shifted there from
worse wars and refugee crises in Africa.
As they get larger, NGOs are also looking more and more like
businesses themselves. In the past, such groups sought no profits,
paid
low wages -- or none at all -- and employed idealists. Now a whole
class of them, even if not directly backed by businesses, have taken
on
corporate trappings. Known collectively as BINGOs, these groups
manage
funds and employ staff which a medium-sized company would envy. Like
corporations, they attend conferences endlessly. Fund-raisers and
senior staff at such NGOs earn wages comparable to the private
sector.
Some bodies, once registered as charities, now choose to become
non-profit companies or charitable trusts for tax reasons and so that
they can control their spending and programmes more easily. Many big
charities have trading arms, registered as companies. One
manufacturing
company, Tetra Pak, has even considered sponsoring emergency food
delivery as a way to advertise itself. Any neat division between the
corporate and the NGO worlds is long gone. Many NGOs operate as
competitors seeking contracts in the aid market, raising funds with
polished media campaigns and lobbying governments as hard as any
other
business. Governments and UN bodies could now, in theory, ask for
tenders from businesses and NGOs to carry out their programmes. It
seems only a matter of time before this happens. If NGOs are cheap
and
good at delivering food or health care in tough areas, they should
win
the contracts easily.
Good intentions not enough
It could be argued that it does not matter even if NGOs are losing
their independence, becoming just another arm of government or
another
business. GRINGOs and BINGOs, after all, may be more efficient than
the
old sort of charity.
Many do achieve great things: they may represent the last hope for
civilians caught in civil wars, for those imprisoned unfairly and for
millions of desperate refugees. There are many examples of small,
efficient and inspirational groups with great achievements: the best
will employ local people, keep foreign expertise to a minimum,
attempt
precise goals (such as providing clean water) and think deeply about
the long-term impact of their work. Some of these grow into large,
well-run groups.
But there are also problems. NGOs may be assumed to be less
bureaucratic, wasteful or corrupt than governments, but
under-scrutinised groups can suffer from the same chief failing: they
can get into bad ways because they are not accountable to anyone.
Critics also suspect that some aid groups are used to propagate
western
values, as Christian missionaries did in the 19th century. Many NGOs,
lacking any base in the local population and with their money coming
from outside, simply try to impose their ideas without debate. For
example, they often work to promote women's or children's interests
as
defined by western societies, winning funds easily but causing social
disruption on the ground.
Groups that carry out population or birth-control projects are
particularly controversial; some are paid to carry out sterilisation
programmes in the poor parts of the world, because donors in the rich
world consider there are too many people there. Anti-"slavery"
campaigns in Africa, in which western NGOs buy children's freedom for
a
few hundred dollars each, are notorious. Unicef has condemned such
groups, but American NGOs continue to buy slaves -- or people they
consider slaves -- in southern Sudan. Clearly, buying slaves, if that
is what they are, will do little to discourage the practice of
trading
them.
NGOs also get involved in situations where their presence may prolong
or complicate wars, where they end up feeding armies, sheltering
hostages or serving as cover for warring parties. These may be the
unintended consequences of aid delivery, but they also complicate
foreign policy.
Even under calmer conditions, in non-emergency development work, not
all single-interest groups may be the best guarantors of long-term
success. They are rarely obliged to think about trade-offs in policy
or
to consider broad, cross-sector approaches to development. NGOs are
"often organised to promote particular goals...rather than the
broader
goal of development," argues Ms Lancaster. In Kosovo last spring,
"many
governments made bilateral funding agreements with NGOs, greatly
undermining UNHCR's ability to prioritise programmes or monitor
efficiency," says Peter Morris of MSF. This spring in Kosovo, "there
were instances of several NGOs competing to work in the same camps,
duplication of essential services," complains an Oxfam worker. And
whatever big international NGOs do in the developing world, they
bring
in western living standards, personnel and purchasing power which can
transform local markets and generate great local resentment. In
troubled zones where foreign NGOs flourish, weekends bring a line of
smart four-by-fours parked at the best beaches, restaurants or
nightclubs. The local beggars do well, but discrepancies between
expatriate staff and, say, impoverished local officials trying to do
the same work can cause deep antipathy. Not only have NGOs diverted
funds away from local governments, but they are often seen as
directly
challenging their sovereignty.
NGOs can also become self-perpetuating. When the problem for which
they
were founded is solved, they seek new campaigns and new funds. The
old
anti-apartheid movement, its job completed, did not disband, but
instead became another lobby group for southern Africa. As NGOs
become
steadily more powerful on the world scene, the best antidote to
hubris,
and to institutionalisation, would be this: disband when the job is
done. The chief aim of NGOs should be their own abolition.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
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