Inclusion vs. Inequities Among NGOs: Evidence from Recent NGO Conferences

by Cecelia Lynch

Recent reports on humanitarian trends continue to beg the very important question of how and why paternalism in the aid industry continues. One of the major reasons, as shown in these reports, is the funding structure that privileges the large, western NGOs over “national” networks and “local” organizations.  As one of the pieces suggests, the very nomenclature – “internationals” versus “nationals” and “locals” is very much part of the problem. Is there anything being done about the inequities maintained by this aid architecture? The short answer, based on forums and debates at two recent, prominent meetings of NGOs, is “not much,” despite the fact that the issue of inequities is receiving considerably more attention at one of the forums at least.

I recently attended the InterAction Annual Forum in Washington, D.C., and the UNHCR/NGO Annual Consultations in Geneva.  Both are major NGO forums that draw hundreds of secular and faith-based representatives. The InterAction meeting attracts U.S.-based donors and consultants, in addition to NGOs, while the UNHCR/NGO consultations offer a platform for consultations between UNHCR officials and humanitarian aid groups around the world.

Briefly stated, the question is whether the aid industry can allow local NGOs, the most knowledgeable and concerned about situations on-the-ground, to have an effective voice in decision-making processes. Unfortunately, this much-needed reinvention of the NGO galaxy risks being undermined by contrivances in the ever-present and ever-growing NGO/donor machinery. This machinery rests on a funding structure which privileges the large transnational (and western) groups, and which does not seem to be ready for genuine challenges to its enormous power.

At the UNHCR/NGO annual consultations, two main ideas dominated the panels I attended, both of which, if followed through, could transform some of the way humanitarian aid is practiced.  The first idea was to incorporate refugees into decisions about their own care, protection, and futures.  The second idea was to promote  “community-based protection, support and care” – the notion that local communities that are either sites of conflict or sites of refugee settlement should be listened to and included in any measures for security, employment, health and social services, etc.  Both of these ideas, to the credit of the organizers, were promoted as primary components of the overarching theme, “In Pursuit of Solutions.”

Aren’t these ideas obvious?  One might think that both would be all-too-evident, but in the humanitarian international today, one would be mistaken.  To address this problem, the UNHCR/NGO consultations featured a number of rich panel discussions that featured refugees and local community members. One of these included an activist from southern Sudan who detailed the very concrete protection measures her women’s network (made up of women of different faith traditions) has trained people to take in order to survive government bombings.  Concrete measures include instructions on how to make emergency shelters in caves or by digging foxholes, how to store provisions, and when and how to run for cover.  These are the kinds of things that are critical to survival, but need to be thought through “from the ground up” by those who are living through crisis on a daily basis.

Another panel featured a university dean, a local imam and a Pentecostal bishop from the Adamawa Peace Initiative in Nigeria, who have worked together – for several years – to feed hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the fighting with Boko Haram. One of the fascinating things about their presentation was the description of how difficult it was to attract outside funding in the early stages of their work.  When larger NGOs did notice, however (mostly after the highly-publicized kidnappings of the girls from Chibok), they wanted to reinvent the wheel by redesigning the work of the already-successful local network, rather than simply supporting its painstaking efforts.

It is evident from these forums, as well as my interviews with faith-based and secular groups on-the-ground, that too many obstacles continue to hinder the prioritization of communities and refugees themselves. The first issue is that both UN agencies and donor states continue to channel most funding through the big transnational aid groups. This issue was raised at the UNHCR/NGO conference more than once, and has arisen numerous times in my own interviews. “Local” groups continually complain that they cannot compete with the resources of the large transnationals – both religious and secular. These resources, including large budgets and numbers of staff as well as access to UN and donor state personnel, allow the big NGOs to submit successful grant proposals according to complex bureaucratic regulations and provide (often misleading) metrics of accountability. Donors also find it easier to deal with known quantities, even if these big organizations have higher costs than local groups, including much higher salary structures, and even though they don’t always go into the areas of most need that local groups can access.

While there are many steps that UN agencies and donor states can take to give money directly to local communities and refugees themselves, current trends made evident at the InterAction annual conference in Washington, D.C. demonstrate that new boundaries to local control are constantly being erected.  Two examples illustrate this problem. First is the quest by the larger organization to remain “relevant,” a concern voiced in several panels. Second is the development of ever-more-specific metrics to measure “value” for each dollar spent on aid.  There are, of course, legitimate reasons for both concerns. But the quest to remain significant, for example, was almost always phrased in terms of demonstrating importance to donors and the public rather than to recipient populations. One panelist, in a telling example, said that while he did not want to scare the NGO representatives who were present in the room, what could happen if, in the future, people circumvented them entirely? What if, in other words, people connected to “prospective donors without [the larger, western] NGOs in the middle? What if we don’t exist?” Of course, this is an odd question if we remember that the objective of NGOs should be to put themselves out of existence in favor of local control if at all possible.

Regarding metrics, newer types of accountability discussed at the InterAction meetings include SROI (social return on investment, measured in a variety of ways as current or estimated future “value created” by each dollar of aid invested), “evidence-based” models of analysis that speak to private sector concerns about efficiency, and numerous pilot programs to measure “compliance” on-the-ground.  In addition, participants in a panel on standards acknowledged that the Charity Indicator pie chart, which purportedly shows how much of an organization’s funds go to overhead costs and how much to the work on-site, is misleading and illusory, because there are no consistent and clear categories for measuring things like salaries for international workers in recipient countries, or the costs of conducting compliance and measurement studies themselves.  While networks of aid organizations from both the global north and the global south are working together to develop new standards and a more transparent way of indicating expenditures, it is fascinating that the larger NGOs increasingly take on the persona of private businesses, including extremely stratified organizational structures. For example, a number of the sessions at the InterAction conference were reserved for “member CEOs only”; while sessions on working with the private sector, demonstrating accountability, and “innovative finance” were run by people with titles such as “Social Innovations Director,” “Results and Measurement Advisor,” and “Senior Advisor, Foundation Advocacy and Evaluation.”

Each of the panelists I listened to who had such titles was knowledgeable, smart and caring about the work itself. But only occasionally would someone from the audience call attention to, as one questioner put it, “the reasons we got into this in the first place,” or worry that the panelists were too focused on “technical solutions” rather than prioritizing the needs and experiences of aid recipients themselves.

The discussions at these forums indicate that the worries about inequities in the humanitarian aid industry are justified.  Yet another indicator of inequities concerns the cost of attendance and the ease of registration for the two conferences. The registration process was simple for the InterAction meeting, but the cost of attendance was roughly three times as high as for similar academic conferences. Registration costs alone came to more than $300 per day, a fee that is sure to be prohibitive for the partners “on-the-ground” of U.S.-based NGOs. (Note: lunches and one banquet dinner were included; I missed the window for early, discounted registration although it was still extremely expensive; and I attended only two of the three days to save on costs). While comparisons are always problematic, it may be worth noting that the daily registration fee was more than the annual per capita income in Burundi, one of the countries where many of the NGOs concerned are currently working to avert a growing crisis. No wonder that the expenditures made to hold large conferences in nice hotels is a frequent source of complaint for activists on-the-ground. In partial contrast, while the UNHCR/NGO annual meeting offered free registration, the cumbersome on-line registration procedures create bureaucratic barriers, especially for NGOs without constant and reliable internet access, or who have had only sporadic contact with UN agencies. And again, the costs of travel and lodging in places like Geneva can make participation impossible. These features provide additional insights into the disadvantages faced by local groups, including the prohibitive costs of being included in important decision-making forums and the bureaucratic obstacles that have to be surmounted to receive UN and donor funding.

Is there any chance of the humanitarian aid world becoming more inclusive and egalitarian?  There was certainly a lot of concern at the UNHCR/NGO consultations that it should become less top-down. Many agree, at a minimum, that refugees, aid recipients, and local communities, instead of large transnational NGOs, should be determining aid flows, priorities, and programs.  High-ranking officials at both conferences also indicated that the aid world still remained too “western” in orientation, and needed to open up much more to groups from Muslim-majority societies.  But the sheer size and ability of the big organizations to speak the language of (western) donor governments, the UN and private industry; differentiate fundraising, research, public relations and evaluation tasks; and find new ways to measure value on the dollar, present serious obstacles to eliminating paternalism and putting aid recipients in control of their own futures. The assumptions underlying these “industry trends,” illustrated by the business appellations, hierarchical structures and technical concerns of western NGOs and their sponsors, as well as inequities in access to funding and decision-making forums, suggests that humanitarian aid is not likely to be organized according to principles of genuine collaboration anytime soon.

Cecelia Lynch is a professor of political science and director of the Institute for International, Global and Regional Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is also co-editor of the CIHA Blog.

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