Sins of the secular missionaries

A YOUNG man thrusts his crudely printed calling card at the
visitor. After his name are printed three letters: NGO.

"What do you do?" the visitor asks.

"I have formed an NGO."

"Yes, but what does it do?"

"Whatever they want. I am waiting for some funds and then I will
make a project."

Once little more than ragged charities, non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) are now big business. Somalia, where that exchange took place,
is heaven for them. In large parts of the country, western
governments, the United Nations and foreign aid agencies cannot work
directly; it is too dangerous. So outsiders must work through local
groups, which become a powerful source of patronage. "Anybody who's
anybody is an NGO these days," sighs one UN official.

And not just in Somalia. NGOs now head for crisis zones as fast as
journalists do: a war, a flood, refugees, a dodgy election, even a
world trade conference, will draw them like a honey pot. Last spring,
Tirana, the capital of Albania, was swamped by some 200 groups
intending to help the refugees from Kosovo. In Kosovo itself, the
ground is now thick with foreign groups competing to foster democracy,
build homes and proffer goods and services. Environmental activists in
Norway board whaling ships; do-gooders gather for the Chiapas rebels
in Mexico.

In recent years, such groups have mushroomed. A 1995 UN report on
global governance suggested that nearly 29,000 international NGOs
existed. Domestic ones have grown even faster. By one estimate, there
are now 2m in America alone, most formed in the past 30 years. In
Russia, where almost none existed before the fall of communism, there
are at least 65,000. Dozens are created daily; in Kenya alone, some
240 NGOs are now created every year.

Most of these are minnows; some are whales, with annual incomes of
millions of dollars and a worldwide operation. Some are primarily
helpers, distributing relief where it is needed; some are mainly
campaigners, existing to promote issues deemed important by their
members. The general public tends to see them as uniformly altruistic,
idealistic and independent. But the term "NGO", like the activities of
the NGOs themselves, deserves much sharper scrutiny.

Governments' puppets?

The tag "Non-Governmental Organisation" was used first at the founding
of the UN. It implies that NGOs keep their distance from officialdom;
they do things that governments will not, or cannot, do. In fact, NGOs
have a great deal to do with governments. Not all of it is healthy.
Take the aid NGOs. A growing share of development spending, emergency
relief and aid transfers passes through them. According to Carol
Lancaster, a former deputy director of USAID, America's development
body, NGOs have become "the most important constituency for the
activities of development aid agencies". Much of the food delivered by
the World Food Programme, a UN body, in Albania last year was actually
handed out by NGOs working in the refugee camps. Between 1990 and
1994, the proportion of the EU's relief aid channelled through NGOs
rose from 47% to 67%. The Red Cross reckons that NGOs now disburse
more money than the World Bank.

And governments are happy to provide that money. Of Oxfam's #98m
($162m) income in 1998, a quarter, #24.1m, was given by the British
government and the EU. World Vision US, which boasts of being the
world's "largest privately funded Christian relief and development
organisation", collected $55m-worth of goods that year from the
American government. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the winner of
last year's Nobel peace prize, gets 46% of its income from government
sources. Of 120 NGOs which sprang up in Kenya between 1993 and the end
of 1996, all but nine received all their income from foreign
governments and international bodies. Such official contributions will
go on, especially if the public gets more stingy. Today's young,
educated and rich give a smaller share of their incomes away than did
-- and do -- their parents.

In Africa, where international help has the greatest influence,
western governments have long been shifting their aid towards NGOs.
America's help, some $711m last year, increasingly goes to approved
organisations, often via USAID. Europe's donors also say that
bilateral aid should go to NGOs, which are generally more open and
efficient than governments. For the UN, too, they are now seen as
indispensable. The new head of the UN's Development Programme says the
body "will put a lot more emphasis on relations with NGOs". Most such
agencies now have hundreds of NGO partners.

So the principal reason for the recent boom in NGOs is that western
governments finance them. This is not a matter of charity, but of
privatisation: many "non-governmental" groups are becoming contractors
for governments. Governments prefer to pass aid through NGOs because
it is cheaper, more efficient -- and more at arm's length -- than
direct official aid.

Governments also find NGOs useful in ways that go beyond the
distribution of food and blankets. Some bring back useful information,
and make it part of their brief to do so. Outfits such as the
International Crisis Group and Global Witness publish detailed and
opinionated reports from places beset by war or other disasters. The
work of Global Witness in Angola is actually paid for by the British
Foreign Office.

Diplomats and governments, as well as other NGOs, journalists and the
public, can make good use of these reports. As the staff of foreign
embassies shrink, and the need to keep abreast of events abroad
increases, governments inevitably turn to private sources of
information. In some benighted parts of the world, sometimes only NGOs
can nowadays reveal what is going on.

Take, for example, human rights, the business of one of the biggest of
the campaigning NGOs, Amnesty International. Amnesty has around 1m
members in over 162 countries, and its campaigns against political
repression, in particular against unfair imprisonment, are known
around the world. The information it gathers is often unavailable from
other sources.

Where western governments' interests match those of campaigning NGOs,
they can form effective alliances. In 1997, a coalition of over 350
NGOs pushed for, and obtained, a treaty against the use of landmines.
The campaign was backed by the usual array of concerned governments
(Canada, the Scandinavians) and won the Nobel peace prize.

NGOs are also interesting and useful to governments because they work
in the midst of conflict. Many were created by wars: the Red Cross
after the Battle of Solferino in 1859, the Save the Children Fund
after the first world war, MSF after the Biafran war. By being "close
to the action" some NGOs, perhaps unwittingly, provide good cover for
spies -- a more traditional means by which governments gather
information.

In some cases, NGOs are taking over directly from diplomats: not
attempting to help the victims of war, but to end the wars themselves.
Some try to restrict arms flows, such as Saferworld, which is against
small arms. Others attempt to negotiate ceasefires. The Italian
Catholic lay community of Sant' Egidio helped to end 13 years of civil
war in Mozambique in 1992. International Alert, a London-based peace
research group, tried the same for Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s. Last
year, Unicef (a part of the UN) and the Carter Centre, founded by
ex-President Jimmy Carter, brought about a peace deal of sorts between
Uganda and Sudan. There are now roughly 500 groups registered by the
European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation. "Civil
war demands civil action," say the organisers.

Larger NGOs have pledged not to act as "instruments of government
foreign policy". But at times they are seen as just that. Governments
are more willing to pay groups to deliver humanitarian aid to a war
zone than to deliver it themselves. Last autumn, America's Congress
passed a resolution to deliver food aid to rebels in southern Sudan
via USAID and sympathetic Christian groups (religious NGOs earn the
label RINGOs, and are found everywhere).

Perhaps the most potent sign of the closeness between NGOs and
governments, aside from their financial links, is the exchange of
personnel. In developing countries, where the civil service is poor,
some governments ask NGOs to help with the paperwork requested by the
World Bank and other international institutions. Politicians, or
their wives, often have their own local NGOs. In the developed world,
meanwhile, increasing numbers of civil servants take time off to work
for NGOs, and vice versa: Oxfam has former staff members not only in
the British government, but also in the Finance Ministry of Uganda.
This symbiotic relationship with government (earning some groups the
tag GRINGO) may make the governments of developing countries work
better. It may also help aid groups to do their job effectively. But
it hardly reflects their independence.

NGOS can also stray too close to the corporate world. Some, known to
critics as "business NGOs", deliberately model themselves on, or
depend greatly on, particular corporations. Bigger ones have
commercial arms, media departments, aggressive head-hunting methods
and a wide array of private fund-raising and investment strategies.
Smaller ones can be overwhelmed by philanthropic businesses or their
owners: Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft, gave $25m last year to an
NGO that is looking for a vaccine for AIDS, transforming it overnight
from a small group with a good idea to a powerful one with a lot of
money to spend.

The business of helping

In 1997, according to the OECD, NGOs raised $5.5 billion from private
donors. The real figure may well be higher: as leisure, travel and
other industries have grown, so too have charities. In 1995 non-profit
groups (including, but not only, NGOs) provided over 12% of all jobs
in the Netherlands, 8% in America and 6% in Britain.

Many groups have come to depend on their media presence to help with
fund-raising. This is bringing NGOs their greatest problems. They are
adapting from shoebox outfits, stuffing envelopes and sending off
perhaps one container of medicines, to sophisticated
multi-million-dollar operations. In the now-crowded relief market,
campaigning groups must jostle for attention: increasingly, NGOs
compete and spend a lot of time and money marketing themselves. Bigger
ones typically spend 10% of their funds on marketing and fund-raising.
The focus of such NGOs can easily shift from finding solutions and
helping needy recipients to pleasing their donors and winning
television coverage. Events at Goma, in Congo, in 1994 brought this
problem home. Tens of thousands of refugees from Rwanda, who had
flooded into Goma, depended on food and shelter from the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees and from NGOs. Their dramatic plight drew
the television cameras and, with them, the chance for publicity and
huge donations. A frantic scramble for funds led groups to lie about
their projects. Fearful that the media and then the public might lose
confidence in NGOs, the Red Cross drew up an approved list of NGOs and
got them to put their names to a ten-point code of conduct, reproduced
above.

Since then, NGOs have been working hard to improve. More than 70
groups and 142 governments backed the 1995 code of conduct, agreeing
that aid should be delivered "only on a basis of need". "We hold
ourselves accountable to both those we seek to assist and those from
whom we accept resources," they pledged. Yet in Kosovo last year there
was a similar scramble, with groups pushing to be seen by camera crews
as they worked. Personnel and resources were even shifted there from
worse wars and refugee crises in Africa.

As they get larger, NGOs are also looking more and more like
businesses themselves. In the past, such groups sought no profits,
paid low wages -- or none at all -- and employed idealists. Now a
whole class of them, even if not directly backed by businesses, have
taken on corporate trappings. Known collectively as BINGOs, these
groups manage funds and employ staff which a medium-sized company
would envy. Like corporations, they attend conferences endlessly.
Fund-raisers and senior staff at such NGOs earn wages comparable to
the private sector. Some bodies, once registered as charities, now
choose to become non-profit companies or charitable trusts for tax
reasons and so that they can control their spending and programmes
more easily. Many big charities have trading arms, registered as
companies. One manufacturing company, Tetra Pak, has even considered
sponsoring emergency food delivery as a way to advertise itself.
Any neat division between the corporate and the NGO worlds is long
gone. Many NGOs operate as competitors seeking contracts in the aid
market, raising funds with polished media campaigns and lobbying
governments as hard as any other business. Governments and UN bodies
could now, in theory, ask for tenders from businesses and NGOs to
carry out their programmes. It seems only a matter of time before this
happens. If NGOs are cheap and good at delivering food or health care
in tough areas, they should win the contracts easily.

Good intentions not enough

It could be argued that it does not matter even if NGOs are losing
their independence, becoming just another arm of government or another
business. GRINGOs and BINGOs, after all, may be more efficient than
the old sort of charity.

Many do achieve great things: they may represent the last hope for
civilians caught in civil wars, for those imprisoned unfairly and for
millions of desperate refugees. There are many examples of small,
efficient and inspirational groups with great achievements: the best
will employ local people, keep foreign expertise to a minimum, attempt
precise goals (such as providing clean water) and think deeply about
the long-term impact of their work. Some of these grow into large,
well-run groups.

But there are also problems. NGOs may be assumed to be less
bureaucratic, wasteful or corrupt than governments, but
under-scrutinised groups can suffer from the same chief failing: they
can get into bad ways because they are not accountable to anyone.
Critics also suspect that some aid groups are used to propagate
western values, as Christian missionaries did in the 19th century.
Many NGOs, lacking any base in the local population and with their
money coming from outside, simply try to impose their ideas without
debate. For example, they often work to promote women's or children's
interests as defined by western societies, winning funds easily but
causing social disruption on the ground.

Groups that carry out population or birth-control projects are
particularly controversial; some are paid to carry out sterilisation
programmes in the poor parts of the world, because donors in the rich
world consider there are too many people there. Anti-"slavery"
campaigns in Africa, in which western NGOs buy children's freedom for
a few hundred dollars each, are notorious. Unicef has condemned such
groups, but American NGOs continue to buy slaves -- or people they
consider slaves -- in southern Sudan. Clearly, buying slaves, if that
is what they are, will do little to discourage the practice of trading
them.

NGOs also get involved in situations where their presence may prolong
or complicate wars, where they end up feeding armies, sheltering
hostages or serving as cover for warring parties. These may be the
unintended consequences of aid delivery, but they also complicate
foreign policy.

Even under calmer conditions, in non-emergency development work, not
all single-interest groups may be the best guarantors of long-term
success. They are rarely obliged to think about trade-offs in policy
or to consider broad, cross-sector approaches to development. NGOs are
"often organised to promote particular goals...rather than the broader
goal of development," argues Ms Lancaster. In Kosovo last spring,
"many governments made bilateral funding agreements with NGOs, greatly
undermining UNHCR's ability to prioritise programmes or monitor
efficiency," says Peter Morris of MSF. This spring in Kosovo, "there
were instances of several NGOs competing to work in the same camps,
duplication of essential services," complains an Oxfam worker.
And whatever big international NGOs do in the developing world, they
bring in western living standards, personnel and purchasing power
which can transform local markets and generate great local resentment.
In troubled zones where foreign NGOs flourish, weekends bring a line
of smart four-by-fours parked at the best beaches, restaurants or
nightclubs. The local beggars do well, but discrepancies between
expatriate staff and, say, impoverished local officials trying to do
the same work can cause deep antipathy. Not only have NGOs diverted
funds away from local governments, but they are often seen as directly
challenging their sovereignty.

NGOs can also become self-perpetuating. When the problem for which
they were founded is solved, they seek new campaigns and new funds.
The old anti-apartheid movement, its job completed, did not disband,
but instead became another lobby group for southern Africa. As NGOs
become steadily more powerful on the world scene, the best antidote to
hubris, and to institutionalisation, would be this: disband when the
job is done. The chief aim of NGOs should be their own abolition.

 

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