INGOs Should Align with Development Frameworks of Developing Countries

Posted on 10 August 2010

By Steven Lawry

This is the second of two posts by Steven Lawry exploring why and how developing country governments should set a strong, clear frame for development efforts, and why and how donors and INGOs should work within that frame.

In my last post, I argued that INGOs tend not to work as closely as they should with governments in developing countries.  This has many causes.  An important one is that donors have found INGOs to be reasonably efficient vehicles for channeling funding to developing countries on terms that ensure the donors retain maximum control over program priorities and program management.  

This is short-sighted and undercuts many benefits to development strategy and poverty reduction that would result where both donors and INGOs worked more closely with host governments.  In this post, I offer some reflections on what can be gained by closer donor-INGO-host government management of development strategy and programming.

INGO programs can benefit from the ideas of host-government civil servants

By not engaging actively and routinely with governments, INGOs don’t benefit from the experience and good judgment of local civil servants, many of whom are similarly committed to poverty reduction.  My experience is that local officials possess hard-earned, grassroots experience, and have good ideas on how to execute poverty reduction programs.  The benefit of this knowledge is lost where INGO staff are not obliged to check in regularly with host-country officials, for reviews of program progress and effectiveness, or when these reviews are treated by both sides as perfunctory exercises.

INGOs can help governments implement their development strategies

Some INGO leaders might argue that, as civil society organizations, their role is not to work with governments, but directly with the poorest. I don’t want to argue that INGOs should be directing their staff to work principally with governments or channel their funding through government ministries.  But many developing country governments have development plans and strategies of their own.  INGOs should take cognizance of those plans, and work in concert with the government’s programs where their purposes are consistent with poverty reduction. 

INGO field work should be directed to regions of the country where government sees the greatest needs.  INGOs should make every effort to recruit staff locally to fill positions at the highest levels.  Local staff members not only understand the local context, but tend to be more attuned to host-government plans and priorities than international staff. Surely, good things can happen, in terms of the relevance and sustainability of INGO work and in terms of improved government capacity, if more opportunities were fostered to work together.

Better national policy yields more impactful INGO programming

INGOs tend to operate in a project mode, and not in the realm of policy and program. Sustained poverty reduction requires sympathetic and supportive public policies.  Governments need to join INGOs by directing more of their own resources to the education and health needs of women and girls.  Official banking regulations need to be supportive of micro-finance institutions.  Agricultural pricing policies and land tenure policies need to be supportive of small-holder agriculture. 

Too often, INGOs work in policy environments that have implications counterproductive to the outcomes they promote.  INGOs can help villagers build rural schools and health posts.  But at the end of the day, those facilities are must be staffed by properly trained and appropriately paid teachers and clinicians.  INGOs have an active interest in helping governments get policies right. 

INGOs can help governments manage aid better

A friend who works for USAID here in Juba remarked the other day that some governments, given their many concerns, including the scarcity and shortage of skilled staff, are happy for INGOs to operate more or less freely in providing essential services and needed relief. No doubt this is true.  INGOs often work in very poor countries. The incapacities of host governments are just another expression of that poverty. But the pathway to sustained poverty reduction should also include a strategy that helps governments become better at shaping and managing poverty reduction programs, even under circumstances of dire poverty and limited public finances. 

This is something that President Seretse Khama understood to be a benefit of having expatriates working side by side with Batswana civil servants. When the advisors were gone, a template of good management practice remained. 

Democratic governments will insist on better terms of engagement.

Mention of Seretse Khama and the example of Botswana brings me to the question of what it will take to bring about a new dispensation in donor-INGO-host government relations, one where all three parties work in closer unison on an authentically shared vision for poverty reduction. 

Frankly, the initiative is not going to come from donors or INGOs, despite the obvious advantages of greater collaboration.  Donor governments have their own strongly-held ideas about economic development and poverty reduction, and increasingly have found in INGOs partners willing to work to those ideas. 

The impetus for a new dispensation will likely come from developing country leaders who believe, like Seretse Khama, that their country’s efforts to reduce poverty are too important to be left to donors and INGOs alone, no matter how expert, resourced and good-intentioned they may be. These leaders, like Khama before them, will by definition be democrats, whose sense of urgency for meaningful and rapid progress will be in large part driven by the rising expectations of a citizenry prepared to hold their leaders accountable. 

Steven Lawry, Senior Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, is currently based in Juba, Southern Sudan, where he heads a USAID-funded project assisting the Government of Southern Sudan to develop a new land policy.