Photo from web.
The images on television of fat-bellied African children staring at cameras with fly-filled eyes, or Latin American indigenous groups fighting to preserve their ancestral homelands always moved Mary Jane to the point of tears. In defiance of her father’s desire for her to study business or “the real stuff,” as he used to call it, she went on to take social science courses in college in an attempt to understand the causes behind the tragedies that upset her conscience.
In her four years there, Mary Jane learned how her privileged life stood in sharp contrast to the fragile security of many people living beyond the borders of her country. Guilt and urgency took possession of her: guilt over having been excessively sheltered all of her life, and urgency to to give back for being born in such a privileged part of the globe.
Determined, Mary Jane decided to channel these sentiments and turn them into the motors of her career. She romanticized the idea of traveling foreign roads with unpronounceable names, while helping the dispossessed. She imagined herself – khaki-colored cargo pants, ranger boots and a Lonely Planet book in her backpack – fully engaged in her humanitarian apostleship against famine, illiteracy, AIDS, homelessness and other issues. In one of her visits home during her senior year, Mary Jane made the grand announcement to the family.
“I want to work for an NGO,” Mary Jane said. And so she did.
Not one day passes by without people pursuing kindness in many ways. Even the smallest gesture, like giving up one’s spot in the supermarket line to someone in a hurry, helps make coexistence a bit more bearable. But most significantly, the hotspot for the display of compassion is in the Southern Hemisphere. It is here that the bulk of generous actions seems to take place, particularly those coming directly from or sponsored by Western countries. The common ordain: bring the injustice of an unequal order to an end.
Non-governmental organiza-tions (NGOs) fall at the center of what works as a market for the supply of global empathy. Primarily funded by powerful governments and multinational entities such as the United Nations, the army of the warm-hearted grew at an exponential rate in the 1990s. This NGO enterprise was not the result of a sudden change of heart in the Northern Hemisphere. Strategically, it developed at a time when the democratization effort, understood in terms of liberalization of markets and the decrease of state-provided social services, was at its zenith in the former Soviet Union, Africa and Latin America.
In order to ease the social convulsions of the economic and political changes of the Washington Consensus or the International Monetary Fund’s neoliberal “shock therapy” doctrine (a sudden release of currency control coupled with trade liberalization and withdrawal of state subsidies encouraged by intergovernmental organizations – which proved to be all shock and no therapy), policymakers put stress on the strengthening of “civil society.” In reality, this rhetoric was an attempt to cover up the inability of developing states to provide basic goods and services to their people. The romantic “grassroots empowerment” idea sold well. The sprawling number of NGOs in the Southern Hemisphere during this decade was only the advent of what has become a trend in development.
Run by locals who depend on European or American aid, or by members of the new generations of the former colonizer countries, NGOs have created a monopoly on humanitarian work. In the same way, many students who have not considered finance and wish to go down a more socially-minded road have fallen into the trap of thinking that an NGO is the only available option. But while we may think that we are joining a kinder side of humanity and setting ourselves above those (so-called) bad profiteers, we might in fact be deceiving ourselves.
Surely, NGOs continue to play an important role to fill in many societies, and it would be unfair to hold all NGOs to the same criticism. Many of them direct attention to matters that can pass unnoticed by governments, and a few have been at the vanguard of revolutionary change that truly benefited majorities and minorities alike. At the same time, ignorance regarding the development of NGOs, their undertakings and their real impact on progress, has led to mixed results.
To admit that NGOs work in a primarily selfish world and that they are run by selfish people is to face a fact. Yes, altruistic intentions exist. I have them, you have them, we all do. But generous ideals are a far cry from genuinely altruistic actions. No matter how much we like to think of ourselves as selfless beings, the fact remains that survival is imprinted in our genes. NGOs are not spared from this instinct. They are made up of people that need jobs to satisfy their needs. Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, would these people really want to achieve their goals if it meant they’d no longer have a job? Take a guess.
Antagonistic relationships among NGOs themselves are a telling sign of their many limitations. Every year, hundreds of thousands of them jostle for limited funds that come from popular donors such as the Ford Foundation, USAID, the European Union and others in order to carry on with their projects. But NGOs, rather than mastering skills that lead to the success of their social experiments, end up becoming experts in proposing grand-sounding projects. The task often involves only a computer and the e-mail address of a funding office in the northwestern quarter of the world. More often than not, that is all it takes to dispatch a large amount of money into the NGOs’ bank accounts.
The most important tool used by NGOs in attracting benevolent donors is making it sound as if the fate of an entire country or people is at stake and can be vastly helped by a donation to one of their proposed projects. They make it sound as if viable solutionS can only come from the programs they want to create. But if just half of what NGOs propose is accomplished, we should consider it a major success.
Even when it would make more sense for NGOs to work in conjunction with others that have similar aspirations, a desire for special recognition motivates them to act in rather fragmented, inefficient ways. Number estimates are hard to establish, but in India alone the estimate is that more than a million NGOs are working on the ground for significantly fewer than a million problems.
Gender and the environment are among the most pronounced concerns for these entities at the moment, which will inevitably change according to what becomes fashionable. Cohesive efforts are rare, and if NGOs ever come together to coordinate strategies, issues of power and hierarchy flourish, rendering talk of collective action a joke.
As disheartening as it can be, there is a lesson to be learned from acknowledging how NGOs can capitalize on the very issues they claim to fight against. Disempowerment is not just what many want to remedy, but it is the reason for their existence. Yet, the money keeps on flowing from the North to the Southern recipients of international pity, without a pause for reflection or reconsideration. Caught up by the charity complex of this world, this cycle of condescending paternalism seems unending.
Serious development efforts, which should involve strengthening the capacity of states to deliver to their people, are mostly out of the picture. I wonder why the USA’s Marshall Plan in Germany post-WWII made no mention of civil society. Could we even imagine a bunch of NGOs in charge of the reconstruction effort? If we look at contemporary issues like the Haiti earthquake, we see it already fading into the background and losing the public’s attention. Meanwhile, the country is still waiting for a development strategy that is cohesive and smart, allowing it to move from the status of aid-republic to respectable, independent statehood.
If we want to change a corner of this justice-deprived world, we have to speak the human rights language like we mean every word we utter. This has the serious implication of demanding that our leaders stop treating humanitarianism as a show of goodwill for the cameras or a cute topic for fancy cocktail conferences. It also involves looking at the broader context in which our actions occur. Although we all have a well-intentioned Mary Jane inside us, anxious to go out there and save the world, goodwill alone may just not be good enough. •
