Humanitarian and International Development NGOs

(I originally posted this on Tuesday 11/11/08 and it mysteriously disappeared, so I’m reposting.  Unless there’s been foul play from a new philanthropist acolyte, I can only chalk it up to a site glitch.  Apologies for the redundancy.)

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged, at least by NGO leaders and international development policy experts, that U.S. foreign assistance is badly in need of modernizing and restructuring.   One reason is  excessive fragmentation: aid is distributed by the federal government out of 20 different agencies and 50 different offices.  As critics like to point out, this does not make for policy coherence.

There are myriad factors for this jumble, chief among them the steady disinvestment in USAID over the past two decades.  But there’s another reason that deserves more attention, since it reflects a similar trend among major private foundations and donors: the desire to measure and demonstrate impact.

As three past administrators of USAID point out in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, the focus of many newer presidential initiatives or earmarks is narrowly defined on a particular issue, which is “politically appealing because they appear to have a direct, measurable impact on identifiable individuals.”  Here’s the problem: “… such a concentration on the short-term delivery of goods and services comes at the expense of building sustainable institutions that promote long-term development.”

It’s not enough to make drugs available to treat AIDS in a developing country.  To solve the problem requires a public infrastructure - education and training for clinicians, effective government agencies, appropriate public health education, sustained services - as well as a healthy civil society that will make the drugs less and less necessary by improving the overall health and stability of the affected community.

The current craze in philanthropy for assessing and quantifying impact presents a similar conundrum.   Focusing too closely on individual trees - because it’s easier to count the leaves - makes one run the risk of missing the forest altogether.  As Susan Berresford, former president of the Ford Foundation, remarked over a year ago, “Isn’t it possible that too much reliance on short-term plans can miniaturize ambition for justice and for progress on deeply entrenched problems such as racism, poverty and inequality?”

If the federal government were to develop a comprehensive U.S. development strategy, it could help - at least then the burden can shift to measuring progress on the broad aims of development in toto.  As most community organizers will tell you, rights-based development requires sustained, comprehensive investments in people and communities, and processes for developing local capacity and reforming social structures are messy and non-linear.  A commitment to improving human security - which a new Obama adminstration has put forward as an important element of its  approach to U.S. global engagement - requires a willingness to accept that some crucial elements of progress might be unquantifiable.  The political appeal of short-term results will have to give way to a more complicated, nuanced picture - and that would buck the prevailing winds in the sector.

One thing about taking in more money and becoming responsible for a larger share of international development assistance: you get noticed.

Foreign policy experts have begun to include NGOs in their analysis.  First comes a mention in Foreign Affairs by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he analyzes changes in geopolitical power and includes humanitarian and development NGOs among the list of entities wielding influence.

In the latest issue of Foreign Policy, a trio from the New America Foundation - Michael Cohen, Maria Figueroa Kupcu, and Parag Khanna - call NGOs this era’s “new colonialists.” Their thesis is based on the view that NGOs are providing services and assuming responsibilities that governments in many developing countries are unable to perform, a role formerly played by “colonial masters or superpower patrons.”

I suppose equating NGOs with colonialists is meant to be provocative, but it doesn’t work, even if the role has switched hands.  It’s like calling the Prius the new Hummer.  They both get you from here to there, but the goals and values behind the design are completely different.  And goals and values matter when it comes to colonialism, which the Oxford dictionary defines as “acquiring control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.”

The authors have, however, fingered a critical issue for the field:

Seeing jobs that need to be done, the new colonialists simply roll up their sleeves and go to work, with or without the cooperation of states.  That can be good for the family whose house needs rebuilding or the young mother who needs vaccinations for her child.  But it can be a blow to the authority of an already weak government.  And it may do nothing to ensure that a state will be able to provide for its citizens in the future.

This is undeniably a dynamic that most responsible NGOs recognize and strategically try to address.  It can be precariously difficult to provide high-quality, life-saving services while acting as a catalyst for a more responsive and capable government to take over, rather than creating a cycle of dependence.

But the authors conflate different types of situations and actors in the examples they cite (Booz Allen Hamilton and Save the Children have differing priorities, to say the least) and dismiss out of hand the notion that NGOs are truly committed to strengthening and encouraging governments to rise to the responsibility, simply because they find it “difficult to find examples where these groups have pulled up stakes because the needs they seek to address are no more.”

I don’t think examples are hard to find.  In Afghanistan (where one of the article’s case studies is located), CARE set up and ran a water system in Kabul that they successfully lobbied Karzai’s government to pick up.  In India, they began an integrated health and nutrition program in 100,000 villages throughout 10 states for which the state governments ultimately assumed full responsibility.  These are just two examples out of several for one organization.  There are also cases of NGOs leaving significant money on the table because they felt strongly that the project should be government-led or might weaken local governance and capacity.

It’s true that the danger exists of advantaging self-perpetuation or self-interest over a commitment to constituents and mission, and certainly a few NGOs exhibit opportunism above all else.  But the problem is not so much NGOs paying lip service to their pledge of working themselves out of a job - it’s the tricky strategic challenge of getting the balance right of different imperatives. In fact, some portion of the growth of NGOs could well be attributable to whatever halting success they’ve experienced in building local capacity and transitioning out.  It’s an attractive selling point.  It’s not like anybody else has a better track record.

It’s nice to be noticed.  It’s nicer if the nuances could be more fully developed.

PS.  The online version of the Foreign Policy article lists “The World’s Most Powerful Development NGOs.”  No mention of who picked it or the criteria used.  How does it compare to your list?