The other night, perhaps It’s best to say the other week (sorry for the inactivity), the eve of Yom Kippur, we met with the other AJWS volunteers and ended up discussing the issue of aid in Uganda and the overall developing world.
The main question at play was who are the donor organizations looking out for: the person/people in need of help and an improved way of life, the NGO receiving the grant, or themselves—the institute giving the funds? There are many different sides to this question, we mainly focused on the unintended consequences of NGO work. In a country where an office complex could have nothing but NGOs, the initial thinking is that things are much better off than they were 10 or 20 years ago, aren’t they?
Walking around Ntinda (pronounced in a fashion where the first letter is hardly but a half humming sound of N), the neighborhood in which we live, in you can’t help but notice signs on top of signs representing the different NGOs. There are basically office parks that are seemingly NGO incubators. And they are everywhere. NGOs that build sanitary latrines, NGOs that focus on Malaria, African empowerment, women lawyers, children with disabilities, HIV, orphans, and tuberculosis, to name a few. It would be great that, in the land of NGOs, much like say, Silicon Valley, the NGO industry were streamlined and adept at attacking the issues each organization faces. Instead, there are conflicting ideas of how to battle the issues, money spent on monitoring how money is spent, and other inefficiencies that plague these local NGOs. The ideal is still a distant dream. The large bodies of water separating the funding from the organization does not aid in a solution either.
Who runs the NGO?
Who is dictating what to build? What will a particular program do? One side says to empower the community to decide how to use donor money; allow the community to choose a new toilet manufacturer. Others believe that the NGO should decide the best program for battling hunger, for example. Still there are yet others who think that the West has the best perspective and knows the efficient way to have their money spent. The latter is not a view held by locals here.
Example of a bad Idea: create a cheap shoe and market it to Whole Foods customers. The purchase of one pair of these shoes will be matched by the company and another pair of shoes will be given to a shoeless child in Africa.
The Unintended Consequence: Boy receives free shoes and after 4-6 months of wearing said shoes they are worn through, or he has grown out of them. He cannot find another pair of free shoes and his calluses that once protected his feet are gone. He cuts his feet when walking barefoot again, risking infection. Worse yet, the free shoes have corrupted the local market and the shoemaker must now fight with free footwear, which is a losing battle.
Example of a Good Idea: Fund the treatment for AIDS and subsidize the cocktail of antiviral drugs that combat AIDS and HIV.
When approaching the complexities of a seemingly good idea, there more evident it becomes that there isn’t always a wrong or right answer. The stakeholders with the best perspectives are ever changing and vary from issue to issue. One thing we learned for sure—nothing is ever simple.
Monitoring and Evaluation
One catch phrase I can’t seem to get away from hearing is M&E. At first I thought it was something particular with my NGO, but it is synonymous with many. Monitoring and evaluation at my NGO takes place every quarter. It is three days long and all staff drops everything to report on….well, everything. Each staff member has spent a few days putting their presentation together and will spend a few more after the meetings putting together a follow up report. With all this time spent reporting on work, I can’t help but think how much other work could be completed?
M&E is a direct result of the funding sources. The NGO needs to report to the donor so the donor can then report to their constituencies all the good that their money is being used for. But that “good” doesn’t happen in a quarter, and maybe not even in a year. With staffing an issue for many NGOs they need all the time and effort from their staff to go directly toward that cause. One of the donors who funds my organization requested each receipt tied to their grant money be scanned and e-mailed. More of an accountability concern for that organization, yes, but it takes a lot of time to scan 15-20-50 receipts on the type of scanner that the NGO can afford.
A side note before I move on. I mentioned above that staffing is an issue. A perfect example would be Candidate #4 (see blog entry 12 October, 2011). After extending an offer and him coming to the office to view the contract, he retracted his acceptation. We are not going back to Candidate #3 because my colleagues agreed he was not the right man for the job. So now we need to start the process all over again. Staffing is an issue and not easy to find the right person.
Money Well Spent?
The other morning on the radio’s call in program, a caller said that if the funds spent by the West researching the problems in Africa were given to the country in need, then it would be a better use of the funds. With so many problems/issues facing the developing world, it seems more money might be the solution, but of course the answer is not that simple. Funds are best spent setting up systems that can then be supported by the local community on their own. Any solution that ceases to be a solution when financial aid halts is merely a very expensive band-aid.
