But I would like to tell the story of another organisation I visited yesterday, a small NGO in Delhi of which the tea lady in our Delhi office is President. She is a remarkable individual, who recently, in her late 40s, completed her secondary (high school) certificate through evening classes. But at the weekends, she works with a group of friends to run an NGO which, with the help of local volunteers, has vaccinated hundreds of children in neighbouring slums. They carry out other other ad hoc activities, such as collecting and distributing second hand clothes and successfully fighting a case in court for a woman who had been raped and evicted. They meet the organization’s expenses to hire a doctor and nurse for the clinics and for vaccines and syringes from the modest Rs 40 (just under one dollar) charge for the vaccination, some local fund raising and out of their own pockets.

This small NGO, run out of a back room office by volunteers holding low level positions in government or larger NGOs, and an annual budget of around US$7,000, was able to present a complete set of annual reports, with audited accounts, and monitoring data on all their activities. That is, they can show results to an extent that larger, better funded, better staffed organizations are claiming is not possible.

Charity Navigator is moving firmly in the right direction in assessing the results and accountability of NGOs. For smaller NGOs it is perfectly reasonable to expect them to have a well functioning M&E system, which includes clear indicators collected on a quarterly and annual basis, plus a schedule of periodic formative and process evaluations for a qualitative assessment of their systems and activities. For larger NGOs, then they should be expected to have periodic rigorous impact evaluations which address the issue of what difference they are making. NGOs which do not do these things would not get my money, and should be rated down on Charity Navigator for their failure to engage in serious assessment and learning.

Since – in all areas, not just international development – the move to rigorous impact evaluation is still underway, it would be premature to rate organizations on the findings from such rigorous evaluations. Doing so would create a perverse incentive, since those doing them and finding problems in their programs would fare worse than organizations not undertaking such studies and so not knowing if their programs are working or not. But by basing ratings now on having a system in place to undertake such studies, then Charity Navigator is setting the stage to be able to hold NGOs accountable against actual impact just a few years from now.

Currently Unemployed.