In the second part of this three part essay on foreign aid, I am going into the functioning of modern day NGOs, and the structural issues they are facing. I grew up in the '90s, when NGOs were presented to me as progressive, independent, trustworthy actors that would solve the problems that governments were not able to solve. They almost had an aura of invincibility around them. Having worked in this field for seven years, my view of them totally changed. The current paradigm can be described as an 'aid delivery' system. To overcome its shortcomings we have to move beyond good intentions and focus on a long-term and bottom-up approach.
Beyond good intentions
Before I start, it is important to say it is not my goal to point the finger at anyone. I do not want to blame or scapegoat any particular organization or institution. Often aid work is done with the best intentions. Yet good intentions alone are not enough. As one author on the matter says, we have to go ‘beyond good intentions’.(1) Good intentions have to be coupled with a deep understanding of the environment you are working in and the problems you are trying to solve. Otherwise it will be hard to come up with sustainable solutions. So I want to encourage everyone with an interest in development to look beyond the surface, and step up their game. There is already more than enough aid. That is the good news. We do not need more aid. We just need to help in wiser and more effective ways.
That being said, we need to have a thorough examination, because, as it stands, aid is not aiding. Not only on the level of global economics and politics (see part 1), but also in everyday reality in numerous countries in the Global South, NGO projects are not achieving their intended results, and even if they do, they often have unintended side effects.(2)
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| African children playing. What do they need from us? |
There are many accounts of failed aid projects, but one study really stands out. The more than 400 members of The Listening Project held in-depth interviews with over 6,000 recipients of aid in 20 different countries over the course of four years. Even though people generally appreciated that organizations tried to help them, and some efforts did have some positive results, they almost universally came to the same conclusion: the overall accumulated effect of aid was negative. Development aid had made their lives worse.(3)
The aid delivery system
So where do aid projects fall short? Some authors talk about contemporary aid as a ‘delivery system’.(4) Many NGOs focus on delivering goods and services to people that are perceived as being ‘in need’. This may sound very commendable, yet it raises many concerns. Often, NGOs function more like businesses than as real community builders. The focus can be on the short term, lacking accountability to their real stakeholders. Such NGOs tend to focus on growth, keeping people dependent and securing their own funding. Relationships with local people can be shallow as aid often comes prepackaged. Real empowerment can be harder to find. Let me go over these shortcomings one at a time.
The focus of many NGOs is on the short term. Just like businesses they focus on providing as many goods and services as possible. There is rarely an assessment of the long-term impact of their work. This is partly because of how NGOs are funded. They usually get project money for one or two years. Donors want to see value for their money, so they want to see visible results in the short term. After the funding cycle of a project is over, rarely anyone ever follows up on it, as there is no money to do so. NGOs often implement their project and then go. Projects can fall apart because of lack of continued support. However, as long as NGOs can show their donors that they delivered the required amount of goods and services in time, they can get funding for the next project.
NGOs therefore face a fundamental problem of accountability. The people whom they help, are not the ones who pay for it. NGOs are usually funded by donors that are in offices in places far away from where the work on the ground is being done. As long as they can keep those donors satisfied, NGOs can continue to receive funding. So whether the recipients of the aid are content or not with the aid provided, often has no bearing on whether the NGO can continue its work. In that aspect NGOs are different from businesses. If businesses would provide bad service, their costumers would stop paying for them and the company would be forced to adapt or go out of business. The NGO model, is different in this aspect however.(5)
NGOs again resemble businesses in the sense that they are often interested in growing. NGOs regularly speak of success when they receive more funding and can extend their operations. The goal of any development work though, should be to make itself superfluous. When development happens, aid should no longer be necessary. NGOs routinely make up plans to deliver goods and services, but they often do not plan how to stop doing this. There is no exit strategy.
Consequently local people are kept dependent. There is no real incentive to make them independent as this would mean the NGO would put itself out of business. The report from The Listening Project states:
[People] see that international actors bring projects that, instead of solving a problem, seem only to lead to more projects and more assistance, ad infinitum. When assistance is provided in “dribs and drabs,” as a Zimbabwean village chief said, and when it arrives in piecemeal projects with short time frames (as many people said), it has no lasting effect except to create expectations – and a need – for yet another follow-up project, yet more assistance, and yet more outsiders deciding what should be done and how they will do it. ‘Too much’ and ‘too easy’ are how many people explain why aid produces dependency.(6)
Because they want to grow, NGOs are incentivized to go where it is easy. In order to get more funding, you have to get more projects and you have to show more (short-term) results. So it is more convenient for NGOs to focus on problems and areas that are easy to ‘sell’ to donors and that receive a lot of attention in donor countries. There is less encouragement to work on more complex or less ‘popular’ issues. There is also less motivation to go to places that are more difficult to access(7) or where short term results might not be so easy to obtain.
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| An African mother nursing. How to create a better world for her children? |
In this process, development work can become very bureaucratic and often disconnected from the reality on the ground. Some authors talk about ‘NGOization’, to refer to the professionalization and institutionalization of social action.(9) In order to get funding, NGO staff needs to spend a lot of time writing applications and lobbying for grants. They spend their time in offices following standardized procedures and often do not have enough time to get to know the context of the places they are trying to direct this funding to. Instead there exists an image of NGO staff as foreigners being driven around in four-wheel drives, living in gated compounds, limited in their interaction with local people.(10)
Because of the way funding is provided, there's a tendency for projects to be delivered in a prepackaged way. NGOs are under time pressure to ‘sell’ projects to donors in order to obtain funds. There is often not enough time to deeply understand local problems and create programs that are adapted to local needs. William Easterly says they come at it with a ‘planner’ approach instead of a ‘searcher’ approach. ‘Planners’ assume they know everything in advance, while searchers start out without any preconceived ideas:
A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.(11)
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| 'The Listening Project' report |
Scarcity ideology
Why this focus on ‘delivery’? On a more fundamentel, ideological level, the idea of ‘development’ implies a focus on what people lack. Philospher Ivan Illich writes: “Poverty became a measure of a person’s lack in terms of ‘needed’ goods, and even more in ‘needed services’.”(12) It comes from a sense of scarcity. Our development paradigm is based on a linear approach where ‘underdeveloped’ people need to be brought towards the same standard of living as ‘developed’ people. We are trying to make people more like us. It is a one way street, a ‘one size fits all’ approach that has less attention for context. There is little focus on diversity or creativity.
Such a paradigm does not empower people. The Listening Project report writes:
Some [recipients of aid] connect their dependency on outsiders to a growing sense of powerlessness. They say it is disempowering to ‘feel used’ in activities others design and run. Further, they feel that the ways that aid agencies interact with them diminishes their power to manage their own lives, which undermines their capabilities and self-confidence.(13)
And thus the involvement of local people can be quite superficial.(14) They do not always have a real voice in what is happening. In many cases NGOs have little time to listen to the people they serve, even though those people have a unique perspective on their own problems. NGOs like to talk about inclusive approaches, but many times these are but empty words. The interviewees of The Listening Project generally remarked this was the first time they were able to talk freely and openly about their problems.(15)
And so, to conclude, the service delivery system of aid we have, may not always provide long-term solutions. It might be keeping people in the Global South aid dependent. Donor-driven NGOs are at a risk of becoming bureaucratic, lost in paperwork and more concerned about the next cycle of funding then the impact their projects are having on the ground. There is not always sufficient time to follow up on projects or to really get to know local people and the issues they are facing. In the third and final essay of this series on development, I will look at what possible solutions may look like. (16)
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