What If NGOs Collaborated?
Posted on 04 September 2010
By Laure “Voop” de Vulpillieres
Sometimes the best approaches are the simplest ones. In fact, the NGO world has been built on a very simple approach. People need help? Let’s help them.
Carrying this out can be far trickier, and NGOs have come up with some innovative ways to bring that help. I worked with Save the Children in Bangladesh this summer, and saw some fantastic projects both at this organization and at others. I learned about sex workers organizing unions, imams providing training on preventing sexually transmitted diseases in their communities, and teens lobbying in a youth parliament to learn about government representation.
These projects are well designed and are demonstrating positive results in their communities, but the projects tend to only operate in a defined geographic area. I have asked project managers at many NGOs (including CARE, Plan, and others) why they do not scale up their innovative programs to other parts of the country. Our conversation generally goes like this:
Voop: The innovations in your program are great, why don’t you bring them to more people?
NGO Manager: Because we don’t have the funds to expand the project.
This answer is so last decade. Now, in 2010, the answer should be: collaborate with government and civil society (or other NGOs) so that they can take on these great ideas!
Save the Children has recently rolled out a new strategy for improving its international development work. I have been engaged with this strategy since last winter and I respect it more each day. Save the Children thinks that the best ideas out there need to be more widely implemented so that more than a few lucky project areas benefit. They don’t care if they are the ones implementing those ideas.
There is a lot of territorialism around project ideas: if I have a great idea to reduce infant mortality, then nobody else can use that idea. In Bangladesh, I observed numerous NGOs working in the same sector and doing almost identical work. They are each reinventing the wheel, seldom speaking with one another.
Save the Children would like to help change this. They want to share what they are doing: advertise their findings, gather like-minded NGOs to lessons learned workshops, and share ideas.
The hope is that true collaboration will blossom, where organizations gain good ideas from one another, using them to strengthen their own programs. A great method to reduce infant mortality could get adopted by other health NGOs, increasing their impact.
This approach seems so simple: just share and collaborate! Why haven’t NGOs done it yet? Indeed, it takes time and resources; organizations need to devote manpower to information dissemination. NGO staff are sometimes reluctant to share their ideas because they are either territorial or afraid that their ideas will be judged harshly.
We need to get over this, if we want our work to make a real difference. Also, donors need to start rewarding organizations for collaborating … but donor reform is a whole other can of worms.
Save the Children is starting to feel its way through this unfamiliar system. I commend them heartily on their efforts and hope that the NGO community will recognize that genuine collaboration can be a powerful strategy.
Laure “Voop” de Vulpillieres is a Masters in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and had a 2010 Hauser Summer Fellowship.
7 responses to What If NGOs Collaborated?
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“Why haven’t NGOs done it yet?”
Seriously? They haven’t? Perhaps some more study before making pronouncements like this would be in order.
Wow. You worked in Bangladesh for the summer and you’re offering the NGO world advice? Really? So Harvard’s teaching you that this is an appropriate sample size? Here’s some advice from the NGO world to you: learn a bit more before making public proclamations. One thing you might learn – NGOs know that to form good partnerships, you have to know how to communicate and contextualize. You’ve done neither well.
They do collaborate and share ideas. I’m surprised this article was even published. “You should talk to each other and get more money for your good projects.”
Unless you have a specific idea for how to implement a solution, I don’t see how making broad ill-informed statements is going to help anything.
Have you on research on whether your assumption that your limited anecdotal experience is representative of NGOs in general? If so, what does your research tell you about why NGOs haven’t already implemented a version of the general solution you propose? And so on.
The advice in this article reminds me of telling an unemployed person that he should get a job. Yes, it really is that simple. Until you’ve walked in his shoes.
Thanks very much for the comments. I want this blog a place where people of differing points of view, diverse experiences and various backgrounds can exchange analysis, opinions and ideas about NGOs, development and humanitarian work. I think posts that reflect people’s impressions can stir the pot in the way this piece has. The issue of NGO collaboration (the decades of grappling with this issue, the innovative NGO partnerships and collaborations that have taken place, and the signigicant obstacles to systematic collaboration and coordination that remain) is complex and important. I’d love to explore this issue further on the blog – guest posts are most welcome. Contact me at sherine_jayawickrama@harvard.edu
Perhaps this article needed to be fleshed out a bit, I have more questions than answers. I won’t repeat the obvious criticisms pointed out above. I do want to know, however, why is “we don’t have the funds,” a last decade answer and not a credible reason for the lack of expansion in that region of Bangladesh? And as Katie points out, you could’ve advanced the general debate on NGOs by writing about why NGOs in your area of Bangladesh aren’t collaborating with each other, civil society or government. There’s probably a lot more that you could’ve written here, but perhaps, held back?
1) NGOs do not exist simply because “people need help”. They exist because the state and the private sector fail to assist certain groups of people. It is that “simple” dynamic which makes carrying out their work tricky.
2) Why is implementation territorial in Bangladesh? It has a lot to do with local partners, who work in geographically fixed locations and are also often larger than their INGO funding partners. Also, some areas need assistance more than others (check out UNICEF’s MNCS approach if you’re so interested on under 5 mortality).
3) Be careful with your current perspective. In 2010 the real answer may be: bypass INGOs, go for local partnerships and explore social entrepeneurship (i.e. Grameen).
4) Donors have been supporting NGO consortiums for a while now. Take a loot at who ECHO is funding now for example. In Bangladesh, the donors themselves sit in consortia to pool their funding.
5) Read about the CLTS approach, which is pretty much standard in Bangladesh. NGOs collaborate to implement this as a standard approach.
I’d love to hear Save’s comments on this blog!
Laure, you might want to do some study of UNOCHA’s cluster system as well. It’s used in humanitarian relief situations (eg, Haiti after the earthquake, the eastern DRC all the time) to coordinate activities among NGO’s. Theoretically, it is supposed to prevent overlap and ensure that most sectors are covered in an efficient manner. It doesn’t always work well (a lot depends on the local OCHA rep’s ability to wrangle the NGO’s, as well as donor funding priorities), but it’s certainly better than what existed before. Local organizations are included in the clusters so as to facilitate partnerships for program implementation.
I don’t believe OCHA has a presence in Bangladesh, so it’s understandable that you wouldn’t have encountered the cluster system. That said, though, even in countries where OCHA doesn’t have offices, there’s typically some level of coordination, regular meetings, etc. of humanitarian actors working in the country. It would be worth looking into in more depth.