D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 6, November/December 2001, p. 18 - 20)

Non-governmental development organisations (NDGOs) are important actors in development cooperation. They are able to fill gaps left by state-to-state cooperation. However, in recent years, criticism of these organisations is growing because they tend to sidetrack state institutions, and some of them are created precisely to take advantage of available funds.

One of the most comprehensive studies into the role of NGOs in Third World countries narrates this situation in Sudan (Terje Tvedt, 1998):

“Generally the NGOs acted within a culture of absolute affluence, in which goods and services were not costed ... It was difficult to question the principle that aid was free and in some mysterious way outside the realm of economic realities and the emergence of government systems... The NGOs had a particularistic strategy for development and a particularistic administrative system they tried to establish... Little consideration was given to the problem of organizational sustainability in this context, independent of aid injection... What was common to almost all these projects was that, in order to meet goals and to report success stories so as to maintain support from the home country or the UN family, the NGOs sought to circumvent inefficient state institutions and to work directly with the beneficiaries, and the better they did it the more the authority and legitimacy of the local government structures were eroded... The biggest NGO in the region, Norwegian Church Aid (NCA)... had become not only a state within a state, but “the state”... This situation led to what can be described a local brain drain... which made NCA the biggest employer on the east bank of the Nile... While the programme area was locally called “Little Norway”, the Sudanese administrative staff were called ‘Black Norwegians’... What had taken place was what can be termed a privatization and an externalization of the state...“

International funding capacity for humanitarian and development intervention sometimes leads to unexpected results as the ultimate effect of its injection. As we know from recent conflict research (Engel 1999, Jean and Recine 1999), even many civil wars have been instigated, choreographed and expanded in response to the re-financing and enrichment opportunities exploited by ruthless manipulators of these processes. The mushrooming of the NGO sector in donor and, still faster, in receiver countries may, to a certain extent, be regarded as another indication of this phenomenon. Many of those NGO creations were primarily spurned by the availability of public funds rather than by solidly identified needs. Examples are the multiplication of NGO foundations in Panama, practically “over night” after the announcement of the creation of a World Bank supported national social fund (VENRO 2000), or the hasty shopping spree of formerly barely known German NGOs for mini-project identification in Serbia after the sudden reversal of foreign aid policy towards that country. The availability of yet uncommitted funds seems eo ipso to create the demand for their utilization or consumption. “In this greedy competition for ‘relevant projects’ the discrepancy between expediently presented plans ‘made primarily to solve the problem of gaining access to funding’ and ‘the actual issues surfacing in the implementation’” becomes symptomatic, as a seasoned development anthropologist observed already more than a decade ago (Quarles 1988). That this preoccupation with access to funding has not lessened, appears to be highlighted by an EC Commissioner’s exclamation, 10 years later: “It looks as if NGOs act only around EC buildings!” (VENRO 1998).

Although many NGOs initially opposed the aid establishment, today those are rare which have not become aid-integrated. As quasi administration and implementation agents they facilitate an unconstrained aid flow in the face of the limited absorptive capacity of public institutional channels in most Third World countries. “From trust in the state as carrier of development impulses, the development euphoria switched over to the NGO panacea” (Mossmann 1994). As a result, “NGDOs’ development thinking became standardized along official lines”, and “Southern NGOs tended to emulate the northern partners and often be more intimately linked to the aid system than to the wider society” (Fowler 2000).

Cutting edge of civil society?

NGOs were made to be seen as the cutting edge of ‘civil society’, profiting from the inflated image of this deus ex machina ‘third sector’ concept for democratization strategies. However, as the authors of “Africa works” (Chabal and Daloz 1999) convincingly argue:

“The current assumption about the emergence of such a recognizable civil society in Africa is eminently misleading and derives more from wishful thinking or ideological bias”... “The present profusion of uncoordinated NGO involvement in Africa is unlikely to lead to sustained development (but) could well lead to the hijacking of genuinely needed development aid by the same old and well established elites”.

It certainly would be wrong to assume that NGOs, by their very nature, work more efficiently than public development organizations, that they are less susceptible to corrupt motivations, and that they are less phlegmatic in adapting their concepts to better knowledge and experience. Potentially, however, they possess two important comparative advantages, which they should thoroughly exploit:

• their smallness, predestining them for tailored project work at grassroot/community level;
• their direct accountability to the ultimate source of development funds, i.e. the tax-paying citizen who has chosen them to channel his support to those needy and willing to help themselves to their best ability.

Comparative advantages at risk

These comparative advantages are at risk as soon as public funds invade the NGO scene, inflating the scope of intervention and fragmenting the accountability. As a consequence, loyalty yields to opportunism, shifting towards whoever rules the sources of public funding support. Activities start being programmed and implemented in hasty, superficial response to funding opportunity, diluting the staff selection, project or programme identification, preparation and implementation criteria, at the cost of sustainability.

On the target group side, the publicly-funded NGO programmes in their eagerness for fundable projects suffocate the propensity for self-help. Beneficiaries know too well that in those situations the ‘empty pocket’ argument will not stop the project’s implementation. The vicious circle: no genuine self-help component = no sense of ownership = no sustainability! will be repeated over and over again. Meanwhile groups not reached by NGO or other aid programmes suspend possible self-help efforts in expectation of the arrival of outside ‘help’ in an undetermined future (the ‘father christmas syndrome’).

Private sponsorship, proportionately crowded out by the public co-financing components, loses the opportunity to develop a sense of ownership, a deficit which sooner or later will lead to atrophy of the private sponsor base.

Third World governments have become sensitive to the usurpation of domestic development options by aid-financed foreign and local NGOs. They recognize the unequal distribution of benefits in those uncoordinated, often overlapping or duplicating activities. They have become sensitive to the often autocratic policy orientation and management style of NGOs, especially when by-passing or competing with government structures, depriving the latter of qualified cadres by their comparatively attractive employment conditions. Many governments have now started to take action towards gaining control and coordinating authority over NGO activities, an overdue effort which the donor and NGO community have so far failed to implement.

Need for concerted NGO policy

The critical profile presented above is generalizing and accentuating the problematic features of the NGO scene. Much of what is said may not or only to minor extent apply to many of the better NGOs. However, all of them will agree that the listed features are omnipresent, that they endanger the continued support of the NGO sector in donor as well as receiver countries, and that therefore a concerted NGO policy towards their correction is desirable. After all, NGOs, as the main lever of private emergency and development assistance, can and should remain a potential growth factor in the aid system.

It is against the background of this conclusion that the following criteria should be given priority in future NGO strategy:

• Towards a demand-driven assistance culture. Demand is not equal with want, neither with need. Need may become conscious and turn into want. But for the latter to turn into demand it has to be accompanied by a willingness to give something adequate in exchange, e.g. pay a price. In the aid market for development assistance this price should be the self-help component offered by the receiver; and the relative size of this component to be taken as an indication of the seriousness and urgency of the need expressed and the solidarity of the prospective beneficiaries.
• Putting the country in the driver’s seat. While aid may enter and exit a country or region, governments’ responsibilities are tied to their respective countries’ problems indefinitely. Development aid’s foremost objective should therefore be to strengthen governments’ capacity to rule for the ‘common good’. In this process governments have to become permanent senior partners in all aid-supported activities in their respective countries, with veto right and principal authority over registration and coordination of these activities. The latter would principally evolve on a tripartite project or programme basis, comprising the NGO, the government, and the beneficiary or target community. Through their veto right governments could prevent high-handed aid activities from counteracting national development policies. The latter, after all, have become more realistic and adaptable, being themselves internationally monitored under the donor community’s call for adherence to ‘good governance’/structural adjustment principles. In order to prevent governments’ partnership to degenerate into a merely symbolic role, rubberstamping the all too many aid-sponsored programmes, countries should not be swamped with such programmes beyond their governments’ capacity to take charge of their partnership commitments.
• Reinforcement of the ‘ownership’ principle. Even give-away aid carries stress factors into the receiving society, be it through the growth of greed and envy, embezzlement and corruption, or through the problems met in the management and maintenance of donated stocks and equipment. Without the simultaneous development of an ownership conscience within the target community, development assistance will therefore tend to take the route of minimal exposure to stress, i.e. to be simply ‘consumed’. Only the ‘owner’ is prepared to invest additional energy and resources in order to carry the intervention to a sustainable success.

A sense of ownership can have ideal as well as material roots. Both should anchor a target group to a development intervention: the ideal component via the group’s leadership in the identification and presentation of the project for assistance, including its self-help commitment; the material component in the course of the actual realization of this commitment.

Governments’ sense of ownership should be assured through their subscription to an, if modest, cost-sharing contribution. It should be further developed through their active participation in the project or programme preparation phase, and sealed by their acceptance of expanded public servicing and maintenance commitments where required to secure long-term sustainability.

Last, but not least, also among the sponsor constituency the sense of “ownership” deserves to be cultivated. The private sponsor capital, not the public budget allocation, is the mainstay of the NGO existence and the latent promise for its future growth. “Public support for development assistance today is a mile wide and an inch deep” warns an analysis of trends in public thinking about development cooperation (Smillie 1998). Once NGOs are made to realize that the availability of public funds will have to take secondary role after those provided by their private sponsor base and may eventually decline much below present levels, they will give this base the priority commitment it deserves. Especially the potential of wealthy sponsors (a growing category, as worrying as the widening income disparity in Western societies may be!) has surely not been activated yet to its optimum by meaningful, matter-of-fact information, progress and evaluation reports, financial transparency, and invitation to participate in programming and review meetings and field visits.

• Equal-chance self-help support. A pilot programme, placing the target group initiative in the center and eliminating the ‘father christmas syndrome’ may be considered as a test case for the ability of the NGO sector to cooperate innovatively at the country level.

In such a programme all the initiative for problem identification and project proposal lies with the local self-help group or community. To attract NGO assistance, 50 per cent of the total project cost are to be covered by self-help commitment (40 per cent community, 10 per cent government-sponsored). All the submitted proposals, after brief provisional review of their basic solidity carried out by the respective local government authority, will then be listed periodically for all locally represented NGOs to examine. For those suiting their specific individual capability, NGOs, then, may offer their technical and financial support as tripartite partner. Once the partnership has been established, the three partners will jointly produce a project preparation and implementation plan and a rudimentary socio-economic feasibility assessment. Simultaneously, the participating NGO will distribute project briefs to its sponsor constituency, inviting contributions entitling a sponsor to project-specific information and participation rights in proportion to sponsor shares. Conditions for a successful introduction of such a pilot programme would be:

• the uncompromising insistence on the realization of the self-help component;
• the solidary commitment of the NGOs and other donors active in the programme region to abstain from promoting community development assistance projects without solid self- help commitment;
• a geographically modest start, in order to avoid an unmanageable flood of applications. (The risk of the latter, however, would initially be remote due to the strict self-help condition in an environment where there will still be widespread lingering hope for the eventual arrival of the desired assistance as a gift)
• the organization of a local NGO consortium, as first receiver of the government list of ‘equal-chance’ project proposals and coordinator of the selection process;
• highly responsible observance of the criteria for sustainability, including the capability and willingness of the target community, in cooperation with the appropriate government service, to manage and maintain the project results without further outside assistance after the NGO contract’s expiry.
• a general confidence, prevailing in the selected programme area, in the technical and managerial ability of NGOs to handle such partnership responsibility. In conclusion, NGDOs are reminded of the validity of the self-help concept also and especially in its application to their own needs for reforms in the directions outlined above, i.e.
• develop and reinforce their private sponsor constituencies, including complete and transparent accountability to these constituencies;
• reduce their dependence on national and international public funding and development paradigms attached to it;
• coordinate their activities with the other actors of the development community, and transform their role from that of an instigator and promoter of externally conceived to that of facilitator of autogenous communal development initiatives.

Bibliography
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