by Piyaporn Hawiset
16 February 2000
NGOs, non-government organizations, have long become a buzz word in the alternative and so-called appropriate develoment business. Mainstream development agencies such as the Canadian International Development Agency, USAID, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, just to name a few, took up the banner of NGOs hailing them as the so-called saviours of the international development business (and business it is) as they supposedly looked out for the interests of the little people, often missed in the scramble to spend millions of dollars on third world development projects. And many NGOs do much good in helping to get some of the development effort to do some good at the grass-roots levels. But NGOs, particularly in the developing world, have become an alternative vehicle for making money for the rich through a pretense of caring for the poor. So, what is it that these bloated NGOs in fact do?
Like circling vultures, NGOs have abandoned the late 1999 Seattle road kill and winged in to Bangkok, looking for another free meal. The Thai foreign minister on January 9, 2000 did his best to provide them with one but they disgracefully snubbed him. This inexcusable slap to Thailand's face is typical. Just who do NGOs represent? They purport to be on the side of the poor, but they are not, and nobody elected them to that role at any rate. Their only constituency seems to be Western donor agencies who keep pouring funds down their greedy throats.
Their leaders are professional international conference goers, pampered as special guests at ostentatious First World venues, staying in posh hotels and chasing handouts like lapdogs. They create no wealth, nor are they expected to. In fact they seem to soak it up just about as fast as their venal counterparts-corrupt government officials and dictators and despots of the developing nations whose poor they are ostensibly helping. Their number one activity is pocketing dollars or euros that should rightfully go to the starving masses instead of into their own bloated payrolls and infrastructure.
The Western donor agencies are willing to pay extravagant sums to entertain the NGOs so they keep quiet while the agendas of the multinational corporations are protected through so-called development assistance. Many of the developing nations' economic and political elites have jumped on the bandwagon, making fantastic amounts of money from the easy handouts paid for by taxpayers in western donor countries, while at the same time posing as do-gooders who rarely get their hands dirty in the real business of helping the poor--being out in the heat, dust and misery that most of the world's poor live in.
And what of the NGOs' agendas? They would rather have poor farmers imprisoned than have them grow modern bio-engineered crops. They would rather see rural folk die of malaria than spray the mosquitoes. They would rather complain about new technology than find their own valid and appropriate solutions to problems facing the poor.
Poverty alleviation is the furthest thing from their minds because if they were serious about it they would end up working themselves out of a job. That would be an anathaemia. They are members of a new colonial intelligentsia. Few if any of the causes they advance are mainstream issues in poor world countries.
NGOs should beware. As they become more and more identified with flawed dogma and less and less aligned with anti-poverty efforts, the odds of a backlash from disgusted taxpayers will grow.