What's the matter with foreign aid? (3) Towards collaborative aid

In the first part of the essay, we sketched the economical and political historic background of the current aid system. In the second part, we looked at things in the current NGO-based aid system that are not quite optimal. In the final part, I will start addressing solutions, based on my own experience. What does impactful, effective NGO work look like? We should focus on a paradigm of collaborative, community-based aid, rather than aid delivery.

How to create good conditions for people?

An impactful paradigm is grassroots and not top-down. Local people should be co-creators, who, with the support of aid agencies, move towards becoming more independent and self-sustaining. Aid oughtn't be ‘pushed’ on local people. The Listening Project talks about a ‘collaborative aid system’.(1) You could also call it a community-based approach, where you strengthen local communities by building strong ties with them and giving them the support that really need. You achieve this by taking your time, integrating with the local people and working towards their self-sufficiency.

In community-based aid, you go for the long run. If you want to make a sustainable change, you should let go of one or two year project cycles. It takes a while to figure out what people really need. You cannot just go and offer people whatever looks useful from your perspective. You are an outsider. First you have to spend time on the ground, talk with the people and understand their needs. Get to know their culture and start seeing the world from their eyes. Before you implement any project, thoroughly consult locals and see if they show any interest. Once the project is running, remain open to people’s reactions. Be flexible and creative, and adapt wherever necessary. In this way people will feel heard and appreciated. They will feel involved and have a sense of ownership.

It does not only take a while to see how you can help people, it takes an equally long time – or maybe even longer time – for people to change. In an aid delivery system change is about delivering goods and infrastructure. What you are trying to change is people’s access to resources. In a collaborative approach, you see change first and foremost as a social process. Giving people more stuff does not create lasting change. Lasting change happens when people themselves change. So aid then becomes about changing people’s attitudes and behaviors. And these do not change overnight. An aid delivery approach assumes that you can just deliver goods and implement projects and then walk away. However, in a community-based approach, there is an understanding that nothing will work without community support.

Concomitantly, the role of the NGO worker is different in a collaborative paradigm. In an aid delivery system, the NGO worker is an external expert, coming to implement their expertise. In a collaborative system, their role is more like that of a social worker, spending a lot of time on the street, getting to know people and trying to empower them and working together towards solutions. It is important to integrate with local people. If you want to help people in the Global South, you have to come out of your ivory tower. If you want to understand local people’s needs and help them change, you have to create close connections with them. You cannot just drive around in four-wheel drives and live in gated compounds. 

Many hands to fill

To create sustainable change, you need to give communities a sense of agency and ownership. You have to support them to become more independent. As the saying goes: ‘Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day; teach someone to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.’  Often development leads people to do things like growing cash crops for foreign markets. This way people will make more money in the short run, but eventually it makes them dependent on external markets over which they have little or no control. If the market price for their crop suddenly drops, they might go out of business overnight.(2)

You should focus on making local communities more resilient and resourceful. The emphasis should not be on what they lack, but on what they are capable of. You should help them find ways to adapt to the challenges of their environment, be they climate-related, social or economic. You should not have a ‘one size fits all’ approach, but focus on creativity and flexibility. You should not export your own points of view, but help find answers that are uniquely suited to the local context. Start from a sense of abundance, believing in the innate potential of communities. If you start from a sense of scarcity, all you can do is keep delivering more goods, trying to fill up the void.

Not only NGO attitude is different in a collaborative paradigm, donor attitude is as well. NGOs are dependent on donors so if donors do not adopt a similar mindset, nothing much will change. If NGOs want to go for the long run and adapt to the local reality, they will need some independence. Donors have to realize that people on the ground are in the best position to invest their resources effectively. Donors also have to realize that change takes time and cannot happen overnight. They cannot put very tight restrictions or deadlines on the resources they offer. They should give NGOs some wiggle room. It's better to give a little less resources, but a little more patience. Change cannot just be quantified into standardized reports and timelines. Change is a deep social process, and funders should act accordingly.

In a community-based development model, donors are attracted to a different kind of NGO. The size of the NGO is not so relevant. Funds are made equally available to small grassroots organizations. An NGO’s capacity to write reports, give presentations and comply with bureaucracy should not be the most important yardstick. A powerful and hands-on vision is more attractive. More than institutionalization, innovation and creativity should be valued. Rather than slick business models, donors should go for the human aspect and look for projects that have integrity, authenticity, cultivate strong personal connections and lead with the head and the heart.(3)

Hereby, I conclude my essay on foreign aid. I hope it can give you some insight into how our aid system functions (and malfunctions), and how we can optimize it. Do not get me wrong, it's not all misery and gloom out there. Good work is being done every day by committed people. With the right awareness and support, we can help more people to do really good work and bring about lasting change for the Global South.

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(1) Anderson et al. (2012). Op cit.
(2) Norberg-Hodge. (1991). Op cit., p. 90.
(3) The Listening Project gives some more concrete ideas for how such a funding system could look. Anderson et al. (2012). Op cit., p. 142.