Because NGO funding commonly comes from developed nations, a particularly effective model for NGOs includes using local in-country staff to plan and implement programs on the ground while working with an international board focused on fundraising, outreach, and strategic group planning.
For example, NGOs working to bring amnesty to political refugees will often face intense political adversity, and even violence during their in-country work. But unlike government organizations, NGOs typically have more flexibility to defy a political status quo to pursue what they believe to be important social change.
Missionary — Groups that seek to spread their personal religion while providing humanitarian aid. Hope Ships is an example of a missionary organization. Politics - promotion of democracy, electoral support, promotion of good governance, protection of human rights, etc. Conflict Resolution — management, mitigation, and resolution of conflicts within and between communities or countries. Community-Based Service — supporting civil society, promoting community collaboration, facilitating group meetings, etc.
To summarize, NGOs are simply organizations operating to better the world around them. Some are big, some are small, some have million dollar budgets and government funding, and others operate on volunteered time. Some NGOs aim to promote gender equality while others aim to save the rainforests. Whatever the size, shape or goals, these non-governmental entities are all fighting for, and furthering, a cause.
For more information on our use of cookies, please see our Privacy Policy. This website uses cookies. What Do Nongovernmental Organizations Do? Eric Werker Faisal Z.
We trade in incremental change. NGOs, not just the giants, face huge, entrenched, complex problems; due to donor pressure they are increasingly forced to respond with a discrete project with x number of deliverable outcomes. On assignment to cover the human cost of the military dictatorship in Burma in , I came into contact with a number of NGOs run by Burmese people operating just across the border in Thailand.
I was a bit taken aback by the number of reports thrust into my hands; obviously the funding of reports was popular among donors. One particular feminist grouping impressed me with the breadth of their concerns. The usual report writing, educational and income-generation activities, were just the tip. The group was reaching out, undercover, to communities back in Burma and above all keeping alive the flame of active resistance to the military regime, when it would have been all too easy to give up hope.
These women seemed able constantly to adapt to new challenges and were respected by the people they worked with. Little of this was fundable. So they also did the conferences and presentations in hotels and labyrinthine project applications that foreign funders required. Most media scrutiny of NGO accountability is of how they use funds, their accountability to donors. But what of their accountability towards the recipients of their interventions? A common complaint is that the linkages of aid which NGOs deliver set a predetermined agenda on the kind of services they offer.
More serious are the charges that they NGOize popular resistance movements, acting as unelected spokespersons, deflecting energy away from confrontation with self-help projects and the like, and dividing communities struggling against dispossession. They breed small hopes, solve small issues and take small actions while the movement process is attempting to address the larger issues of displacement facing all our people, NGO beneficiary or not.
Indeed, many of the most radical popular movements today refuse any funding from NGOs, only forming alliances when the NGO could help spread their message. Merlin joined Save the Children in Most of their beneficiaries remain firmly below the poverty line. There is criticism, too, of the market model of development they have followed.
Successive governments have actively encouraged NGO participation in government departments and on all kinds of local boards. Has this co-opted them? The successes they have achieved remain localized. When it comes to emergency humanitarian assistance, certain specialist NGOs are the first port of call. Criticism often follows later about duplication of efforts, mishandling of the situation or of not being consultative enough in reconstruction efforts.
But no assistance is the worse option in this instance. On the environmental front we have some of the most activist large NGOs, whose members are unafraid to put their bodies on the line, as well as some of the most corporate friendly and compromised read about the latter on page NGOs have achieved much in single-issue campaigning, ranging from the abolition of slavery to the landmines ban and access to HIV medication.
When it comes to defending human rights, whether it be espousing the causes of political prisoners or mounting challenges to the persecution of sexual minorities, they have often invited the ire of governments. It is this kind of work that governments want to shut down when they seek to ban NGOs or to stop them receiving foreign funds. Sadly, this is not a disinterested field with universal values. Even the clumsy, lumbering BINGOs achieve much in material terms, but will they really put their shoulders to the wheel behind the greatest liberation struggle of our times, the struggle of the 99 per cent for greater equality?
NGOs are expected to be non-political, but everything they do, operating within highly skewed systems of power, cannot but be political. They might as well get their hands truly dirty. Oxfam website, film posted on 28 April ; nin. Posted 29 October ; nin. This article is from the December issue of New Internationalist.
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