By Najib Saab, Issue 13, July-august 1998

After the theme of children and women as marketing tools for international aid was exploited and exhausted over the last decade, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have recently become an inherent part of any project proposal for development assistance. The magic word among aid agencies now is NGO. While the term NGO might mean any group outside government institutions, be it a professional association, public society, club, research centre, university or private company, it commonly refers to voluntary groups.

The declared objective of including NGOs as part of the process of development aid is to give beneficiaries a role in planning programmes, managing their lives and helping advance their communities. Many of the aid programmes in the poorest areas of developing countries are being handled by governments contrary to this stated objective. As a result, development ideologists have proposed that funds should go directly to NGOs so they could be under grassroots, community control.

The theory seems to have its merits. But the results in practice failed to match expectations. Since international and bilateral agencies started to assign huge funds to NGOs, all types of community associations have mushroomed. Many were arbitrarily established to benefit from what appears an opportunity to turn a fast profit. Some are created by pretentious and jobless individuals with no substantive background or expired socialites searching for any honorary title.

Others are being set up by government officials who have formed cover associations in the names of relatives and friends to allow the transfer of international funds under the umbrella of an NGO. An Arab minister of environment has asked us to review a multi-million-dollar project which had a purely technical nature and required a professional engineering background. The international agency which prepared the project document stipulated that major portions have to be executed by local NGOs.

This meant, in the case of the country concerned, that part-time voluntary groups were awarded highly specialized engineering jobs requiring managerial expertise. Upon reviewing the records of the NGOs in question, we found that the majority of them were small, provisional and experimental voluntary groups, lacking membership, organization, management skills and basic book-keeping requirements which permit a minimum of accountability. Despite this, the project document has put it as a condition that such groupings be entrusted to execute specialized engineering, publishing and managerial activities. It also assumes that NGOs can guarantee the continuity of the project after the international assistance terminates. The project, covering developing public areas and services, takes no consideration of how to train public servants at competent government departments to follow up the work, as if voluntary freelance NGOs can do the work of permanent public bodies.

Our opinion was that the role of voluntary groups is mainly supportive and thus cannot be entrusted with specialized engineering, technical and managerial duties which can only be performed by professional consultants and managers. Freelance amateurs cannot be commissioned, for instance, to produce books and magazines, which is the specialty of professional publishers and journalists.

They cannot manage public services, which is the job of full-time public servants and institutions, especially when continuity is essential for long-term results. Consequently, some NGOs accused us of working against them to the benefit of governments. Our reply was that the interests of countries are more important than the artificial imposition of theories which may be in line with the agendas of international agencies but do not necessarily advance the interests of the communities concerned. NGOs should be given a major role. But such a role cannot be haphazardly bestowed from outside. A prerequisite is that the organization exists as an institution before it is asked to execute grand assignments. NGOs which deserve to survive must demonstrate their capability and qualifications through their actual achievements.

They must be held accountable to the ultimate beneficiaries and not only the donor agencies. It is not acceptable that the easy money which goes to some NGOs should encourage mediocre and amateurish work to replace serious endeavours. NGOs must demonstrate transparency, be held accountable to beneficiaries and recognize their actual role of mobilizing the public ­ a participatory approach which should not, in any way, replace the role of professional specialists and public bodies.

The very definition of an NGO needs to be reconsidered so that it does not remain, in many cases, a synonym for amateurism. A clear line should be drawn to separate between clubs and development NGOs. Unfortunately, the role of many so-called NGOs is restricted to "environmental tourism", which denotes, in their practice, travel around the world to attend conferences and meetings, spending funds assigned to development. A Lebanese "development comrade" has recently explained to me in detail the adventures he encountered while on a trip to attend an environmental conference in a European capital. He described the hotel, restaurants and districts of all colours, except green, and forgot all about the conference, which supposedly discussed hunger, poverty and the environment.

NGOs should not be used as a pretext for poor work, transferring the work of institutions and professionals to amateurs and phantom groups. In contrast to huge sums of development aid going to provisional groups, other funds go to rich institutions that do not qualify for them at all. A recent example occurred in Lebanon, where a development grant was arranged from one European country to Solidere, a private company which boasts in its promotional literature of being the biggest real estate developer in the region. The multi-million-dollar fund to help treat the Normandy waste dump came from a programme for environment and economic self-sufficiency, precisely intended for projects in poor developing countries, which would certainly exclude areas owned and operated by rich real estate developers.

If the rehabilitation of the Normandy dump was the responsibility of the Lebanese government, the grant should have been channeled through the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR). But if rehabilitation was the responsibility of the privately owned and very rich Solidere, this development fund went to the wrong place as Solidere ought to have fully financed the job from its own coffers. These practices are common to international, multilateral and bilateral assistance. Different agencies have been duplicating similar jobs without any central control. Against all rules, they go directly to ministries, government institutions and NGOs to sell their development assistance packages. They avoid going through competent channels to escape scrutiny.

While promoting sub-standard work, they also promote another type of corruption and nepotism by creating fictitious jobs with international finance, thus allowing the employment of friends and relatives of officials from ministries, agencies and embassies. We know of many multi-million-dollar phantom contracts financed by international programmes with no relevance to the country concerned, except to create opportunities for officials to provide extra income to their clan and cronies. They usually end up as trivial and shelved reports.

Unfortunately, some third world countries offer the chance for otherwise obscure foreign bureaucrats to acquire the fake status of celebrities. They claim to be supporting development while they spend more time and money sponsoring entertainment events solely intended for society pages in glossy publications. Has development aid been reduced to a boring exercise in public relations? It is time for development assistance to be regulated, with goals clearly defined. It is not acceptable to allow aid supermarkets to operate unchecked where parties compete among each other to sell more development packages with no central control.

Governments should assume their role in coordinating all types of development assistance, through a competent body with defined role and authority. Creation of shadow groups, NGOs or others, to replace ailing government institutions does not solve the problem. It simply is a form of neo-colonialism. The only viable choice remains supporting competent national institutions in building up their capabilities. Whether we like governments or not, national development programmes can only be executed with the coordination of national institutions and under their umbrella.