Streamlining the NGOs
The roots of the current controversies about some of the NGOs can be traced back to the early days of the emergence of our independence. NGOs of all forms and dimensions began operating in our relatively ruined economy and infrastructure caused by the War of Liberation and the devastating cyclone of 1970.
Numerous international NGOs, many of them funded by western organisations, began to pour in as humanitarian organisations engaged in emergency relief and rehabilitation for the displaced persons, including Bengalis who took refuge in India. Most of these organisations were operated and managed by foreign nationals.
These NG0s, for a number of years, also served as windows of employment opportunities for the people of the impoverished, war ravaged country. Until about the early eighties, there was hardly any supervision or accountability of their operations. By then, however, they had become recognised agents of development, with a powerful grip on the lives and living of the rural population of the country.
About this time, the NGO Bureau was established, which aimed at coordinating and regulating the operations of the NGOs and making them accountable. Right from the beginning, the Bureau was a weak organisation.
One of the main objectives of creating the Bureau was to make it a one-stop service organisation. The NGOs were getting weary of bureaucratic entanglements in their operations, but the Bureau failed to deliver, and began to be viewed as yet another stumbling block in their operations. Getting approval for their project proposals, and the releasing of foreign funds etc. remained a quagmire.
To begin with, the status and the strength of the organisation were weak. The scope of work of the Bureau demanded that it be headed by a person with the rank and status of a secretary to the government.
Furthermore, the staff selected to work for the Bureau consisted of officials co-opted from various departments and ministries, with no previous knowledge and experience of NGO operations. Moreover, at least to my knowledge, right through the mid-nineties, the Bureau was not only understaffed but also began to be recognised more as a stumbling block than a facilitator by the majority of the NGOS.
Despite the fact that the declared objective behind its creation was to cut the red tape, nothing changed. The inadequate staff strength coupled with poor professionalism gave rise to a number of problems, which ultimately became endemic in nature, and that is why today the government is finding it difficult to deal with various contentious concerning the NGOs.
The Bureau began to receive hundreds of project proposals and routine operational reports from NGOs, which it was incapable of even merely reading through, leave alone reviewing or analysing them for assessing suitability and compatibility in relation to the overall goal of our development strategies. Thus, the pressures from both donors and the NGOs mounted, and the Bureau decided to let things go.
This situation led the NGOs to gang up behind the supporting donor agencies. For obvious reasons, the concerned donor agencies decided to support their protégés. There were two major reasons for this. First, the NGOs had turned themselves into agents for rural development, and for the donor agencies it was far less cumbersome to channel funds through the NGOs than into governmental projects.
Second, the donor agencies found or viewed the NGOs as lesser evils compared to government operated projects, at least in terms of corruption and the trickle-down effects of benefits reaching the targeted beneficiaries at ground levels. NGOs soon became blue- eyed boys of the donor agencies. As much as the NGOs were hungry for funds the donor agencies also found it convenient to flush funds through them and meet the quotas fixed by the respective governments.
There were yet other reasons for the donor agencies to have preference for the NGOs over government managed projects. The NGOs were able to create a high visibility factor at ground level, where governmental interventions in "immediate" poverty alleviation activities were almost non-existent. NGOs were, and are, also good at producing sleek project proposals, including completion reports thereof. However, because of donor pressure and the government, the NGOs began to turn themselves into local NGOs having local Boards of Management, particularly during the '90s.
In this process, the NGOs consolidated their position and managed to cut off further from governmental supervision and gain "unbridled" freedom of operations, and were rendered unaccountable for their operations. This was done in a most subtle way. Most of the Boards of Management consisted of "likeminded" people chosen from the NGO community itself, and even from ex-staff members.
Against the backdrop of the above, a handful of large and mid-level NGOs began to view themselves as powerful entities in the national context.
The main bulk of the NGOs, however, continued to work amongst the rural poor, yet never losing sight of their individual power bases in the society. It may be relevant here to mention that today most of the top ten executives of mid-level and large NGOs are some of the most well to do people in this country. Once asked, an NGO executive once told me "you need not be poor to serve the poor." How convenient!!
Let us now look at the most recent study report of Transparency International of Bangladesh (TIB). Having taken into cognisance the merits and demerits of the report, particularly in respect of indulgence in corruption and lack of transparency of operations of the NGOs, the burden of guilt also lies on the shoulders of successive past governments. Besides, while carrying out the survey, and subsequent preparation of its report, TIB overlooked the fact that, all said and done, NGOs are a recognised window of excellence in rural development interventions in the country, whether by default or otherwise. They are a factor in our development strategies, and are here to stay. They happen to be a globally recognised phenomenon.
What the government needs to do
To begin with, the government must realise, and work from the premise, that the so- called violators are only a handful of individuals. There should be no collective harassment of the rest of the NGOs. To that extent, it was wrong to raid the offices of Proshika couple of years back, and that too without the explicit backing of credible intelligence information, as evidenced by the results of the raids. The government must realise that NGOs, in the overall context, have contributed substantially to our development efforts. There are certainly some bad eggs in the basket, however, that does not warrant throwing away the entire basket. The government, therefore, needs to act more prudently. As one sees it, the following measures are warranted:
To begin with, the government must realise, and work from the premise, that the so- called violators are only a handful of individuals. There should be no collective harassment of the rest of the NGOs. To that extent, it was wrong to raid the offices of Proshika couple of years back, and that too without the explicit backing of credible intelligence information, as evidenced by the results of the raids. The government must realise that NGOs, in the overall context, have contributed substantially to our development efforts. There are certainly some bad eggs in the basket, however, that does not warrant throwing away the entire basket. The government, therefore, needs to act more prudently. As one sees it, the following measures are warranted:
- Revise, review, reconstruct and revamp the Adab with a view to making it more effective and representative in character as the main focal point of the entire NGO community.
- Refrain from creating yet another parallel body, which can be highly counterproductive.
- Make the NGOs more accountable to the district-level administration as far as their daily field-level operations are concerned. In this respect, the Indian experience could be of use.
- A complete review of the management structures of randomly selected large and mid-level NGOs should take place in order to arrive at a standardised format, with a view to making the management of the NGOs more democratic, balanced and fair in their in-house management practices.
- Review all business and profit making enterprises, and recommend ways and means of streamlining their operations in line with the government's laid down procedures applicable to other parallel enterprises in the public and the private sector.
- NGOs should be barred from participating in partisan politics of the country directly or indirectly, and from indulging in activities that have the remotest possibility of influencing the people living in the areas of their operations, particularly during the time of national elections.
- Last but not least in importance, the tasks serialised above should be carried out by an independent commission, which will submit its recommendations and findings to the highest authority of the government. The commission should be a high-powered one headed by no less than a retired judge of the High Court. The number of members of the commission should not exceed nine.
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