What are NGOs for?

In March this year I attended an NGO training weekend organised by the BMZ, the German ministry for international development. The objective was to learn how to apply for government funding, which conditions have to be fulfilled, and which documentation is required to prove how the money has been spent. I was representing a small NGO in Berlin called Schulbausteine fur Gando which funds the building of schools in Burkina Faso, West Africa. The training session taught me both how government funding works, and why the NGO sector is not for me.

What struck and disturbed me straight away was that the German government defines NGOs based in Germany as "project carriers". If an NGO's application for government funding is successful, the government funnels over the money. At this point, the role of the NGO is simply to find a "project partner" in some country deemed worthy of assistance, and hand the money over to them. In fact, the government stipulates that there must be a distinction between the project carrier and partner. My NGO had very close contacts with our project partner, (which you would think ought to be a plus), and this could potentially have jeopardised our eligibility for funding. In other words, the NGO in Germany is simply a fundraising mechanism shovelling money from A to B, completely distanced from the people it is ostensibly trying to help.

This is the root of many of the problems in international development today. Firstly, as David Damberger points out in his impassioned TED talk, it creates a lack of accountability. Despite any number of systemic flaws, a government is ultimately accountable to its electorate, and a private company to its customers or shareholders. But an NGO is not accountable to the supposed beneficiaries of development projects. On the contrary, the NGO is accountable to the donors. The NGO simply hands over the money to a project partner - if some of the money goes missing, or is used to build a school which collapses after two years, the people affected have no come back. The NGO will simply make a note not to use the same project partner next time. The NGO in Germany doesn't even necessarily know who they are helping - they are busy chasing donors.

But this state of affairs also leads to dishonesty towards donors. Any number of glamorous NGO websites talk about what "we" do and "our projects". Of course, some NGOs do great work and deserve credit for their efforts. But for a standard project carrier to talk about "our achievements" is deceit. They are simply fundraising organisations - they don't actually carry out any projects themselves, and can provide no guarantees as to the quality or durability of the development work. As Paul Collier says in his book "The Bottom Billion," most NGOs don't even have an office in the countries where they claim to be active, particularly in the poorest countries which don't appeal to staff or are deemed too dangerous.

Even in NGOs active in the field the prioritisation of donor over beneficiary often leads to shoddy projects. David Damberger recounts his experiences with Engineers without Borders, installing water points in Malawi. Returning to the sites 18 months later, he found that 80% of the taps were not working. Donors are happy to provide money for building schools, hospitals or water points, but maintenance is not as sexy. The result is that many projects don't last, and therefore many of the pictures on NGO websites of happy children running their hands under a new tap are lies: the tap has rusted and fallen into disrepair by the time the donor sees the photo.

Many of the people working in the NGO sector work tirelessly for their causes, and some NGOs achieve great things. But if the role of the NGO is merely to raise money it would make more sense for the government to send the money and bypass NGOs altogether. The NGO sector is in desperate need of a radical shake-up but its already poor reputation will probably have to worsen further before anything major is achieved. The amount of poverty in the world is decreasing but is still shameful, and therefore there is a need for international aid. Sadly in its current form the NGO sector is incapable of being much use.