This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post.
What happens when local NGOs want international funds but don't agree with the pro-West, pro-rights agenda?
For the past 20 years, American and European donors (including governments) have worked with and through local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to advance their agendas. This approach is rooted in the political transition of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. When the Berlin Wall came down, Western organizations found ready partners among dissidents, academics, and young people who were eager to remake their societies.
The convergence of domestic aspirations and international interests—at a particular historical moment—allowed organizations like mine, the Open Society Foundations, to advance agendas that broadly encompassed Western liberal values.
For the past two decades, donors like us have stuck to this model. The arrangement is pretty straightforward: donors provide money, expertise, and political support; and, local NGOs conduct programs, advocate for certain policies, and report to the international community.
And who can argue with our agenda? Rule of law and good governance are public goods. Independent media and fair elections safeguard the democratic franchise. Education and public health confer broad social benefits at both ends of the spectrum of life.
Unfortunately, the citizenry in many countries where we work doesn't always agree with us on certain fundamental issues, like human rights and social policy. For example, gay rights and needle exchange programs are controversial in the post-communist region, not to mention in more traditional societies around the world.
Donors often assume that engagement with elites (government officials, NGO leaders, diplomats, multilateral organizations, and their ilk) is enough to win the day. This approach leaves out the general public and sometimes ignores inherent cultural values. It also opens our partners to criticism. If NGOs work on unpopular issues, receive funding from outside groups, and lack meaningful constituencies at home, who exactly do they represent? And how will they sustain themselves if funding from international organizations dries up?
As donors have expanded to new geographies, these questions have become increasingly important. They beg for some serious introspection, especially in a few key areas:
Civil Society vs. NGOs
Tom Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment and others have long pointed out that NGOs constitute only one element of any country's civil society. Trade unions, religious organizations, and even organized crime networks also represent the activities and aspirations of the citizenry. It's time to find ways to expand our engagement with such groups (minus the criminals).
Legitimacy and Sustainability
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. NGOs are and will remain essential partners for the donor community. However, since they rarely develop their own constituencies, NGOs are easily criticized as paid agents of foreign interests. When they represent the real interests of real people, these groups become much harder to ignore. A base of support matters if groups want to continue their work when international donors move on to other countries.
Moreover, donors also need the legitimacy that local constituencies confer. Without it, we're vulnerable to charges of meddling. And, local support helps nurture our values in the long run.
Other Models, Other Rooms
The NGO model has proved relatively sturdy but has also inhibited experimenting with other approaches to promote social change. As we move into new regions and issues, we must develop fresh ways of engaging with local actors. Authoritarian governments in places like Burma and Russia are hostile to non-governmental activity or seek to coopt it by creating their own "civic" organizations (called GONGOS or government organized non-governmental organizations). In such cases, we need to find ways to support individual activists, fund social movements, or develop channels for the free movement of information and expertise.
As long as donors have money to spend, we will remain on the stage. But without innovation, our influence will wane. The Arab Spring is the biggest political and social movement since 1991. We ought not to be using technology that's 20 years old to make the most of it.
Posted in: Europe, Governance & Accountability, United States
Topics: civil society, donors, international aid, Jonas Rolett, NGOs
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Yes, it true that some donors agencies or representatives,governments and some big NGO's are creating their own NGO's who will always push self fish agendas. In our situation, we witnessed a situation of mushrooming NGO's especially during election whereby fly by night voter education and IDP'S NGO's forum are formed to abuse public participation concept especial, the municipalities using such NGO's and individuals in the name of public participation.
Governance & accountability is foreign in our sector,in the sense that our community advice offices are double abused exploited by both so-called donors and bodies called themselves as mother bodies of community advice offices, a practical example is when we are given funding application forms to be filled and completed for e.g. you are told to apply for R250 000.00 and when funding is allocated, you are given R2100.00 a month and be required to report and give case statistics to other so called cluster bodies who are nothing but fly by night which the act confirms the corrupt intentions of forming NGO's in the name of the poor and powerless organizations. All this is done by people who has links with donor representatives.Hence, we say governance & accountability is foreign our sector.
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I think that NGOs are a necessary vehicle to bring a bit of original thinking though imposing values of human rights may initially prove unpopular. Gay rights are clearly controversial, but are children's rights as controversial? I work daily trying to bring confidence to children whose daily rights are infringed - by teachers, parents, in fact anyone older than they. My community are not respectful of children, they have little culture of nurturing and this generates an unchanging society, where children do what was done to them to their own children. Note too, women's rights are ignored here and I cannot really advocate funding an organisation which cements in place these awful women abuses. But, frankly, funders do fund these type of organisations and I feel it is something of political correctness which allows us to conveniently ignore different cultures' abuses, saying we know little of their life and the effect of imposing a different view. I hope for a future for Africa, which is free of these abuses and saying nothing out of political correctness will only slow the process of abuse reduction.
Should we expect Open Society Georgia Foundation (OSGF)engaging with the Georgian orthodox church on gay rights issues? Good luck with that :)
I do ackowledge that in Africa, I have seen scenarios where authoritarian governments have gone out to establish their own NGOs. This is born out of their recognition of the fact that NGOs have got the inherent potential, in most cases, recieve recognition from their communities given their popular agenda. This is a positive that the NGO sector need to recognise, guard and not abuse it to serve reactionary agendas.
Where NGOs pursues unpopular agendas, as a result of available donor funding, this may be a result of inadequate constituency sensitisation on their part. Human communities have an inborn tendency not to take easily to new ideas! It is against this background that adequate sensitisation has got to be at the fore front of their campaigns-there were times when Nations were not at ease with HIV & AIDS programme ( precisely because they associated them with unacceptable social norms of sexual promiscuity). But it took intense sensitization of nations to accept such programmes. The same has got to happen for NGOs working on LGBTI issues!
It is such sesnsitasation campaigns that such NGOs would be trying to gain acceptance of their agenda-and they need to keep foussed on sensitisation campaigns till their agendas gain a degree of acceptance.
But it is suicidal for NGOs just to go straight on into implementing on agendas that have bot gained a degree of acceptance in their communities.
The 'buy in', as above, is at the centre of any successful work the NGOs do as against bending to donor pressure!
Dear Mr. Rollett--
I am an Open Society Fellow for the coming year, and will be doing work in Ukraine, Brazil and South Africa.
I couldn't agree with you more in that we need to experiment with other ways to promote social change!
Gregg Gonsalves
Jonas Rollet hits nail on the head when he says that there is need to find ways to support individual activists. Many NGOs once formed, and get funds from wherever they can, go their own ways. Individuals, no matter they have funds, or get some, are rooted to a cause, not the agenda of the NGO. I am in India, an RTI [same as FOI] protagonist. Here RTI started in 2006, but was usurped by retired bureaucrats, and is being chocked, by officialdom, by people who have found lucrative jobs, but are basically the one's who have lived by 'secrecy' rather than openness which is essence of RTI/FOI. It is not the formation of NGO, but dedication to a 'cause' that is important. I am sure that serving the cause is required by supporting individuals, than only NGOs.
my Friends
These issues are very concerning. You can not compare Ong and put all in one basket. There are NGOs that really leave much to be desired and and sometimes their leaders lost the reason for which they were institutionalized.
But there are NGOs or private social solidarity institutions that assume the state Papell often work without support and have yet to put the dinhnheiro their pockets to address social causes.
I speak from experience because they have many years I have given my contribution NGOs and know some credible NGOs made up of people from communities that have done a lot with very little means. These are institutions who do not know the channels to obtain funding for their projects desesnvolver.
However NGOs know Barrois cosntituído illite by people who do not know the real problems of the Communities, and these are frojam projects that have sponsors, gained much support and little or nothing on behalf of the Communities.
If any donor or partners want to support any Institution of Social Solidarity in Portugal go to GOOGLE and see the work of small institutions such as PROSAUDEC, or institution that has an infrastructure to work as it should. But its directors and employees do their best to help their communities. Institutions like these need to be recognized and apoidas, particularly at this stage that Portugal is facing a major crisis and entered elementary communities are living below the poverty linear.
M. Neto