By Sherine Jayawickrama The lively exchange on NGO collaboration on this blog has me thinking about the variety of ways in which NGOs collaborate and coordinate, what drives them to do so, and what keeps them from collaborating more systematically. NGOs (especially large humanitarian NGOs) and other actors in the international humanitarian system took a [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama A newly-published essay by Andrew Natsios – who served as USAID Administrator from 2001 to 2006 – lays bare the tension between the compliance side of aid bureaucracies and the programmatic side of those same agencies.  He argues that the balance has now tipped so strongly toward compliance that the integrity of [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama Several months ago, a provocatively titled academic paper caught my eye.  The Ethics of INGO Advocacy or Why It’s Okay that No One Elected Oxfam was authored by Jennifer Rubenstein, Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia.   Her presentation and the discussion that followed were interesting and lively.  Chatting with [...]

In response to this blog’s March 7 invitation of a variety of views on Charity Navigator’s decision to change its rating system (to reflect accountability and outcomes measures in addition to financial metrics like overhead), Steve Lawry shared his perspective, and George E. Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz contributed their opinion. In this post, Ken [...]

By George Veth On February 9, Professor L. David Brown joined the NGOs & Development study group, convened by the Hauser Center, where he led a discussion on “NGOs and the Puzzle of Legitimacy and Accountability”. To tee up the discussion, he started by pointing out the recent failure of several supposed bastions of trustworthiness [...]

The next session of the NGOs & Development study group will meet at 4 pm on Tuesday, February 9 at Weil Town Hall (Belfer L1) at the Harvard Kennedy School.  The topic of the discussion, led by Professor L. David Brown, will be “NGOs and the Puzzle of Legitimacy and Accountability”. Professor Brown, who recently [...]

By Steven Lawry It is well known that international NGOs had a huge presence in Haiti before the devastating earthquake of January 12th. Upwards of 8,000 NGOs were working in nearly every developmental and humanitarian assistance sector.  The greater portion of foreign assistance was channeled not to the Haitian government, but directly to NGOs.  Prime [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama When Anne Lynam Goddard started as CEO of the Christian Children’s Fund (now called ChildFund International) in January 2007, she was given two charges: to develop a new strategy and to change the organization’s name.  The former is a process familiar to NGOs.  The latter is rare: changes in brands are common, [...]

By Steven Lawry I am arguing in this four-part series that US foundations working internationally are not making full use of their freedom to support innovation and help people claim new rights—and that progress toward reducing poverty and extending essential rights and liberties may be casualties.  In my post of March 25, I offered three [...]

by Steven Lawry Independent US foundations working internationally have advantages that other kinds of donors, such as the World Bank and USAID, generally don’t. As private funders, foundations are better able to bear risk on behalf of innovative approaches to social change and poverty reduction than are public sector funders. Where foundation-funded work yields promising [...]