Non-governmental organisations: they save the environment, protect human rights and act in the best interest of those who need it most. Right? A growing group of people disagree, and are making themselves heard.
Non-governmental organisations: they save the environment, protect human rights and act in the best interest of those who need it most. Right? A growing group of people disagree, and are making themselves heard.
Both people who have worked for and with NGOs and those who study them (sometimes, they are the same people) have started to question whether they might do more harm than good.
They feel that many NGOs in their current form – as large institutions and paperwork-strewn sites of employment – are not only ineffective, but can act as anti-revolutionary forces.
NGOs are caught in a difficult position. They are an industry. They act as middlemen between donors – usually international donors or sometimes the government – and local communities.
While they aim to facilitate and support community-driven action and change, they still have to align themselves with those they depend on for funding.
Donors who decide what kind of projects to fund are often far removed from the situation on the ground, and the scramble for funds leaves everyone worse off.
"It's a problem in the sense that the funding is often very conditional, tied to a particular programme or project," explains Dr Kirk Helliker, Head of the Rhodes Sociology Department. "Whether or not they're particularly relevant to local conditions is the issue."
Helliker has worked with NGOs and social movements in Zimbabwe and the Eastern Cape for years, and argues in a recent paper that these NGOs have fraught relationship with rural agrarian movements.
He feels that this type of NGO is not only ineffective, but is undermining everyday, organised social struggles.
Local mobilisation, organisation and struggle are fundamental pre-conditions for any meaningful transformation.
"NGOs are chasing money all the time, they have to hunt around: what money is available, what type of projects that funding is for, and can they try to fit that programme into our work?"
He points out that this funding is also temporary and dependent on specific criteria, as laid out by the foreign donor.
Not only are NGOs accountable to the sources of their funding, but also to the thousands of people who work for them.
"NGOs also employ people, so they have to keep surviving," explains Dr Nomalanga Mkhize, Rhodes History lecturer and education worker with a long history of involvement with NGOs.
"This creates a dilemma, because they need the problem to exist to keep working."
"NGOs are thus always caught between their own need to self-preserve and their need to be relevant to their constituencies' ever-evolving and dynamic needs."
Helliker says intervention is very patchy.
"There's no systematic, coherent development," he said. Projects don't last very long and often collapse when funding and support is cut off.
"There's a lot of community dependence," he says. "And it's often argued that it leads to demobilisation of rural communities as well."
This means projects are often not only inefficient and ineffective, but can act to suppress real, motivated social action.
"They tend to be predisposed to try and 'represent' others, drowning out those very voices they seek to represent," says Helliker.
"Rather than having the opportunity of organically setting the terms of their own developments and struggles, and what they envisage for themselves, they have these NGOs stepping in and telling them what to do."
"Look, it's not a conspiracy theory," Helliker is quick to point out. "It's not like NGOs are intentionally seeking to create dependence amongst communities – it's just an unintended consequence of the type of organisation they are."
While this is the unfortunate reality for a lot of NGOs, there are organisations that do things differently – and there are no hard and fast rules for engagement.
"We aim to work ‘with’ rural communities, rather than ‘for’ or ‘on behalf’ of them," explains Lucy O'Keefe, the Director of the Angus Gillis Foundation.
"We try to do this by helping individuals and groups recognise their existing assets, strengths and resources and how they can build upon them."
But no one gets it right every time, and O'Keefe stresses the difficulties that come with the unequal power relationships between NGOs and local communities.
"There are certainly times when we talk more than we listen, times when we step in when we should step back, and there are times when it is very difficult to balance donor and community priorities," admits O'Keefe.
Without NGOs, as Mkhize points out, there would be no domestic abuse survivor shelters, orphanages, matric bridging schools or training centres.
"We live in the real world," Mkhize says. "Someone has to provide a safety net for immediate and short-term crisis situations, NGOs provide that role."
O'Keefe is aware of the difficulties and tensions surrounding her field of work.
"We can’t ignore or deny these realities but we can work very hard to be conscious of them, to continuously challenge ourselves and the way we work, to listen to the input of critical friends and colleagues, and most important, the people whose lives we are affecting."
'NGOs: Undermining Rural Struggles in post-Apartheid South Africa?' was the title of a paper presented recently by Helliker at a Department of Political and International Studies seminar.
