Humanitarian and International Development NGOs

During our seminar with Duncan Green and Lant Pritchett last Friday, we revisited the question of NGOs providing services that governments are expected to provide – thereby undermining the development of effective states.  This is terrain I initially touched upon in reaction to the Foreign Policy article decrying NGOs as “the new colonialists.”

Lant used a metaphor of NGOs as scaffolding – a temporary structure to relieve an immediate burden of a developing community, as well as a resource to build the wall necessary to hold the burden over the long term.  Problem is, often the wall never gets built, and after a while the scaffolding is dismantled and it’s on to the next project.

I cited examples in my initial post to highlight that this is not always the case.  However, I do agree that NGOs can do a much better job of developing strategies – from the very beginning of a project – to ensure that their intention of transitioning a program or services to local government or authority comes to pass.  There is a need to document and share learning about such efforts, and deepen our understanding about what makes them successes or failures.

Martha Chen of the Hauser Center, who coordinates WIEGO, also offered the example of Bangladesh, where NGOs – BRAC in particular – have essentially created and run an educational system in light of the government’s failure to provide this basic service.  While the intent was to provide education until the government assumed responsibility, there seems to be no end in sight, even after close to 20 years.  She raised the possibility of a hybrid, where the NGO takes over permanent authority and responsibility for what we generally consider a state-provided social service.  Could this work?  What would be the implications?

In Duncan’s thesis, a key element in the relationship between active citizens and effective states is taxation.  As he notes in the book, “until governments depend on their publics for their wages, it will always be an uphill struggle to force them to listen.”

Aid distorts taxation.  When a government receives 60% of its revenue from foreign aid (as, Duncan explained, Uganda did until recently), their leadership is going to spend far more time interacting with donors than their own citizens.  Devising a way to provide aid that insists on creating indigenous capacity so that ultimately aid is unnecessary is a conundrum akin to devising a successful U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, with attendant political dynamics and risk to stability.  Perhaps the first step – as in the much-debated military strategy - is making clear that an exit is going to happen, and sticking to it.