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Arabica Robusta

Enough of aid - let's talk reparations | Global Development Professionals Network | The... - 0 views

  • Right now, 14 Caribbean nations are in the process of suing Britain for slavery reparations. They point out that when Britain abolished slavery in 1834 it compensated not the slaves but rather the owners of slaves, to the tune of £20m, the equivalent of £200bn today. Perhaps they will demand reparations equivalent to this figure, but it is conservative: it reflects only the price of the slaves, and tells us nothing of the total value they produced during their lifetimes, nor of the trauma they endured, nor of the hundreds of thousands of slaves who worked and died during the centuries before 1834.
  • Frankie Boyle got it right: “Even our charity is essentially patronising. Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself. Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.”
Arabica Robusta

Do international NGOs still have the right to exist? | Global Development Professionals... - 0 views

  • It’s highly unlikely that corporate bosses regularly ask themselves if their businesses have a right to exist. Their goal is to sell stuff and make a profit. But if your goal is to alleviate poverty and human suffering – in the face of statistics showing mixed outcomes – is this, in fact, the most important question an International NGO can ask of themselves?
  • Power, ironically, is what may be holding INGOs back from achieving impact. Ben Ramalingam, from the Institute of Development Studies said that this has led to a sort of Faustian bargain: with money and access to the corridors of places from Westminster to the World Trade Organisation, INGOs have failed to take risks and instead simply pacified everyone at the expense of seeking real change. Beris Gwynne, the former director of World Vision International agreed: “We’ve become used to being in business, so we’ve become less and less courageous.”
  • If devolving power is what’s needed, it’s one thing to acknowledge it. But as with many things, by far the biggest challenge will be in the execution. It was remarked that of the $150bn (£105bn) spent in aid globally, still only 1% directly reaches southern civil society organisations. I know from experience how frustrating southern NGOs find it when there’s always money to write a report or host a workshop; but never enough for more local staff. If poverty could be overcome from report writing, then we would have solved it long ago.
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  • Perhaps a practical way forward is to confront the real question: what’s the value added of INGOs and what do they need to devolve to others, and to let go of? As one participant remarked: would the poor pay for your services? While marketisation in this way probably takes things too far, it’s a provocative question. Would a poor farmer think its valuable for me to write and present a paper at a high level UN panel, on the causes of her impoverishment, or would it be better to simply give her the cheque (more income than she might see in years) and let her do what she wants with it?
Arabica Robusta

NGO-graphies: On Knowledge Production and Contention | Savage Minds - 0 views

  • the term “fetishize” had judgmental connotations and suggesting that the phrase “local knowledge” is a neutral, technical term that refers to practically-oriented understandings of phenomena prevalent at the community level
  • Others replied, agreeing that
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Diversity and inclusion - 0 views

  • The professional affiliations of NGO Board members reveal an equally disturbing gap between ideals and practice, although it must be acknowledged that the present analysis is limited in scope and a deeper survey would be desirable. I elected to identify Board members who have links to the tobacco, arms or finance industry.
Arabica Robusta

From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements | Books | AlterNet - 0 views

  • Neoliberal retrenchment has met growing resistance by those most affected by the crisis—the world’s smallholder farmers.
  • In 2008, record numbers of the world’s poor experienced hunger, this at a time of record harvests and record profits for the world’s major agrifood corporations. The contradiction of increasing hunger in the midst of wealth and abundance sparked food riots, not seen for many decades.
  • han enough food in the world to feed everyone in 2008—at least 1.5 times current demand. In fact, over the last 20 years, food production has risen steadily at over 2 percent a year, while the rate of population growth has dropped to 1.14 percent a year.
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  • The widespread food protests were not simply crazed “riots” by hungry masses. Rather, they were angry demonstrations against high food prices in countries that formerly had food surpluses, and where government and industry were unresponsive to people’s plight
  • the diversion of large quantities of grains and oil crops for the growing industrial feedlots in the emerging economies, as well as the diversion of land and water for “green” agrofuels, has put significant pressure on markets for many basic foods.
  • This shift from food self-sufficiency to food dependency has been accomplished by colonizing national food systems and destroying peasant agriculture.
  • hough the farmer-to-farmer-NGO partnership has been highly effective in supporting local projects and developing sustainable practices on the ground, unlike Vía Campesina, it has done little to address the need for an enabling policy context for sustainable agriculture.
  • Ironically, the strength of these farmer-to-farmer networks—i.e., their capacity to generate farmers’ agroecological knowledge in a horizontal, widespread, and decentralized fashion—is also a political weakness. On one hand, there are no coordinating bodies within these networks capable of mobilizing farmers for social pressure, advocacy, or political action. On the other, their effectiveness at developing sustainable agriculture at the local level has kept its promoters focused on improving agroecological practices rather than addressing the political and economic conditions for sustainable agriculture.
  • efforts to bring agrarian advocacy to farmer-to-farmer networks have run up against the historical distrust between development NGOs implementing sustain- able agriculture projects and the peasant organizations that make up the new agrarian movements. Aside from having assumed many of the tasks previously expected of the state, NGOs have become an institutional means to advance social and political agendas within the disputed political terrain of civil society.
  • Though the MST initially promoted industrial agriculture among its members, this strategy proved unsustainable and economically disastrous on many of its settlements. In 1990 the movement reached out to other peasant movements practicing agroecology, and at its fourth national congress in 2000, the MST adopted agroecology as national policy to orient production on its settlements.
  • Like its predecessor, the new Green Revolution is essentially a campaign designed to mobilize resources for the expansion of capitalist agriculture.
  • The alternative, smallholder-driven agroecological agriculture, was recognized by the IAASTD as the best strategy for rebuilding agriculture, ending rural poverty and hunger, and establishing food security in the Global South. To be given a chance, however, this strategy requires a combination of strong political will and extensive on-the-ground agroecological practice to overcome opposition from the well-financed Green Revolution.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Development aid: Enemy of emancipation? - 0 views

  • In Africa there have historically been two types of civil society, those that have collaborated with the colonial power and those which have opposed it.
  • Are the big NGOs (non-governmental organisations) harmful towards Africa? FIROZE MANJI: Let’s not talk about their motivations, which are often good. The question is not about evaluating their intentions, but rather the actual consequences of their actions. In a political context where people are oppressed, a humanitarian organisation does nothing but soften the situation, rather than addressing the problem.
  • I have become anti-development. This wasn’t the case before. Let’s have an analogy: did those enslaved need to develop themselves, or to be free? I think that we need emancipation, not development.
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  • These last 20 years we have faced a major change: the financialisation of capitalism. Now, nobody can do anything without capital. Finance controls each and every sector of society.
  • Immediately after Kenya’s independence (1963), a great many important liberation figures were imprisoned, exiled or killed, such as Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. Each time a leader had the courage to rebel, Europe and the United States forced them to back down. We then came to know an empty period until the mid-1990s, when people began to resist and organise themselves again. Today in Kenya, spaces for discussion and debate are not lacking. It’s vibrant, alive and a general trend, including in Europe.
  • Look at Tunisia: you hear that the revolution was caused by Twitter – this can’t be serious! Pens were also used as a means of information and mobilisation. Does this mean that pens caused the revolution? This illustrates a tendency towards technological determinism, towards hi-tech fetishism. We imagine that mobile phones, SMS (short message service), Twitter and Facebook have a power. This type of discussion tends to underestimate the role of those who use them.
  • In Tunisia, protesting in the road called for a lot of courage. A protestor who embraces a soldier, as is seen in a photo, is not produced by technology. It’s thought that this can resolve everything, but a third of Africans have one and there hasn’t been revolution everywhere.
  • Take for example agriculture: the bulk of what’s produced in Africa goes to feed Europe, multinationals and supermarkets. In Kenya we produce millions of flowers. Every day, they leave for Amsterdam. The amount of water used and the chemical products involved destroy our environment. While this goes on, populations have difficulty gaining access to water and food. The countryside ought to be used to produce food!
  • Agricultural production needs to be democratised.
  • I think that Latin America is a dozen years ahead of us. Structural adjustment policies began there two decades ago. I think that in Africa a popular movement will rise up from this from 2020. Chávez is not an exception; he is the product of his history, of a movement for emancipation, like Lula. The question is, how can we ourselves politicise this process? It’s not easy; there’s no technical solution. Workers and farmers need to become organised. This takes time. The positive thing is that this point is now discussed; this wasn’t the case 10 years ago.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The danger of Grameenism - 0 views

  • To his credit, Yunus had also battled backward patriarchal and religious attitudes in Bangladesh, and his hard work extended credit to millions of people. Today there are around 20,000 Grameen staffers servicing 6.6 million borrowers in 45,000 Bangladeshi villages, lending an average of US$160 per borrower (about US$100 million/month in new credits), without collateral, an impressive accomplishment by any standards. The secret to such high turnover was that poor women were typically arranged in groups of five: Two got the first tranche of credit, leaving the other three as ‘chasers’ to pressure repayment, so that they could in turn get the next loans.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      This sounds like a Ponzi scheme.
  • In the same spirit of commodifying everything, Yunus set up a relationship with the biotechnology giant Monsanto to promote biotech and agrochemical products in 1998, which, New Internationalist reported, ‘was cancelled due to public pressure.’
  • Microcredit propagators are always the first to advocate that poor people need to be able to help themselves. The kind of microcredit they promote isn’t really about gaining control, but ensuring the key beneficiaries of global capitalism aren’t forced to take any responsibility for poverty.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Microfinance taking away government responsibility is similar to NGOs relieving pressure from neoliberal governments.
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  • Inside even the most neoliberal financing agency (and Grameen sponsor), the World Bank, these lessons were by obvious by the early 1990s. Sababathy Thillairajah, an economist, had reviewed the bank’s African peasant credit programmes in 1993, and advised colleagues: ‘Leave the people alone. When someone comes and asks you for money, the best favour you can give them is to say “no”… We are all learning at the Bank. Earlier we thought that by bringing in money, financial infrastructure and institutions would be built up – which did not occur quickly.’
  • However, according to ODI’s Bateman, the World Bank ‘insisted on a few changes: the mantra of ‘full cost recovery’, the hard-line belief that the poor must pay the full costs of any programme ostensibly designed to help them, and the key methodology is to impose high interest rates and to reward employees as Wall Street-style motivation.’
  • Worryingly, in the families of some 82 per cent of female borrowers, exchange of dowry has increased since their enrolment with Grameen Bank – it seems that micro-borrowing is seen as enabling the families to pay more dowry than otherwise. Only five to 10 per cent of Grameen borrowers have showed improvement of their quality of life with the help of microcredit, and those who have done will tend to have other sources of income as well
  • This does not mean that credit is not useful to the poor and powerless. The problem lies in the approach taken. Poverty is conceptualised extremely narrowly, only in terms of cash income; when in fact it has to do with all aspects of life, involving both basic material needs such as food, clothing and housing; and basic human needs such as human dignity and rights, education, health and equity. It is true that the rural economy today has received some momentum from microcredit. But the questions remain: Why has this link failed to make any significant impact on poverty? Why, despite the purported ‘success’ of microcredit, do people in distress keep migrating to urban centres? Why does a famine-like situation persists in large parts of Bangladesh, particularly in the north? Moreover, why does the number of people under the poverty line keep rising – alongside the rising microcredit? In fact, poverty has its roots and causes, and expanding the credit net without addressing these will never improve any poverty situation. Experience shows that if countries such as Bangladesh rely heavily on microcredit for alleviating poverty, poverty will remain – to keep the microcredit venture alive. Grameen Bank’s ‘wonderful story’ of prosperity, solidarity and empowerment has only one problem: It never happened.
Arabica Robusta

It's the regime change agenda all the time « what's left - 0 views

  • Many NGOs active in Africa create the illusion of being independent of the Western governments that have historically despoiled the continent, while relying on the same governments to provide their funding. It’s highly unlikely that organizations whose existences depend on the support they can get from Western governments stray far from their funders’ interests and foreign policy imperatives. The implication that NGOs are independent of governments is deliberately deceptive.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      NGOs like Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada provide additional examples of questionable value for development.
  • But the flaw in the Kimberly Process is that it operates on the principle of consensus. That means that participants who seek to deny certification can, for their own mischievous political reasons, withhold their approval and therefore prevent consensus, invoking some unrelated humanitarian principle as justification.
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    The United States, Canada and Australia are abusing the Kimberly Process, an initiative to prevent the sale of "blood" diamonds, in order to frustrate Zimbabwe's efforts to establish a multi-billion dollar annual revenue stream from its rich Marange diamond fields
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Did the aid industry fuel the mayhem in Somalia? - 0 views

  • Relief agencies estimate that nearly 1.4 million Somalis have been displaced since the 1990s, and nearly half the country’s population – more than 3 million people – is still in need of relief aid and assistance. But this is the story of the Somalia that we all know. The less known story is that of a country that was systematically destroyed by international NGOs, UN agencies and donors who undermined the local economy by flooding Somalia with aid, especially since the fall of Siad Barre in 1991.
  • His main argument is that the aid industry undermined development in Somalia by stifling the local economy through relief supplies that killed industries, and which were routinely stolen by warlords, merchants and government officials.
  • A leaked UN report states that roughly half of the $485 million of aid provided to Somalia by the World Food Programme (WFP) in 2009 has gone to corrupt contractors, rebels and even UN staff members. This is not so unusual. A recent BBC report claims that more than 90 per cent of the money raised by Bob Geldof’s famous 1985 Live Aid concert for famine victims in Ethiopia was siphoned off by rebel fighters.
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  • Maren claims that all the aid agencies in Somalia knew that relief food was being stolen, but neglected to mention this fact in their reports or during fund-raising campaigns because millions of dollars and thousands of jobs were at stake. He says that neither the US Government nor United States Agency for International Development (USAID) officials were interested in his revelations, perhaps because, as this month’s New African magazine suggests, all of the United States’ food aid programmes ‘are designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities in world markets’.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Politics is a 'do or die' affair - 0 views

  • ‘I'm sure you are asking yourself the old question why, instead of importing corn from Nebraska to Somalia, U.S aid money can't buy the food locally and boost the local agriculture eco system and value added chain? In case you missed these old vids, check out foreign aid expert Bill Easterly and an Al-Shabaab spokesman of all people lay it all out…’
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    'I'm sure you are asking yourself the old question why, instead of importing corn from Nebraska to Somalia, U.S aid money can't buy the food locally and boost the local agriculture eco system and value added chain? In case you missed these old vids, check out foreign aid expert Bill Easterly and an Al-Shabaab spokesman of all people lay it all out…'
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