I've just returned from a two day visit to the rural areas of Hetauda and will reflect on my findings overnight before posting on that subject tomorrow. It was sobering stuff though - a bleak contrast to the insobriety that I witnessed in some parents of our beneficiaries.
On Sunday an article appeared in The Kathmandu Post entitled "Aid International" the content of which echoed some comments that I have made in previous posts. In it the author "S. Gurung" mocks the world of the International Non Governmental Organisation, its sycophant locally-recruited staff (of which she claims to be one) and its disconnection from the needs of communities in the impoverished rural areas of Nepal:
"Aid International (Al) is a nonprofit, non-political, non-sectarian, humanitarian organisation that provides handsome salaries, perks, trainings and foreign exposure to a massive crew of personnel. Its target beneficiaries are the poor and marginalised, but its real beneficiaries are the staff who run the organisation: Head Office staff in a faraway continent, country staff in Kathmandu, partner NGOs in program districts, and the dazzling array of local and globe-trotting consultants. Its beneficiaries also include the luxury hotels, resorts, travel agencies and airlines it patronises.
Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, most Head Office staff think all developing countries are the same. Donors are busy people burdened with alleviating poverty, managing conflict, fighting HIV/AIDS, raising gender awareness and setting Millennium Development Goals across the globe. So they imagine the world in templates and measure progress with global indicators. For them, the strategy for developing a village in east Africa will also fix the problems of eastern Tarai [south Nepal], and vice versa.
Al’s primary concern is to amass more and more money for, well, helping people. As soon as a major donor announces funding for, say, ‘community empowerment project in the Mid West’, Al hires a consultant to write a ‘strong’ proposal. The proposal must prove that Al is the most eligible and fund-worthy organisation for implementing the project. Beneath the heap of pseudoscientific jargon, the message of the proposal runs to this effect: “The community in the Mid West needs empowerment because you say so. You may never have set foot there, nor read a thing about its people, but you have the funds so you know better. So just give us the dollars; we will follow all your guidelines, achieve all your targets, and meet all your deadlines.”
Al has global solutions for the most localised problems. Say, Som Kumar in Shripur, Saptari quit school and went to lay bricks in town because his father can’t work (he was hit by a bus while pulling his rickshaw) and his mother just had a baby. How will Al help him? It will send Som Kumar, along with all other beneficiaries in his village, to participate in its Multimillion Transnational Awareness Raising Programme. Al’s strategy is not to respond, but to ‘implement’ pre-made, pre-packaged, mass-produced solutions to specific, evolving, complex problems.
Under its Operational Plan, say, Al decides to provide iron tablets to all its beneficiaries in the Far Western region. Then, in a village in Achham, Gita is suddenly taken ill with typhoid. Al’s partner NGO in the region can do nothing but give her iron tablet; for typhoid medicine is not in their Operational Plan. While Gita’s condition worsens and her parents borrow money for her treatment, an NGO staff sits in his office and composes a success story about the miraculous effects of iron tablets on Gita’s life. This, along with a smiling photo of Gita, will be included in the annual report for donors who can then pat themselves on their backs - and get more money for bigger projects.
The chain of command in Al is so glaring that its pet terminologies - ‘bottom-up’, ‘local partnership’, ‘community-based’, etc. sound like self-irony. All Head Office staff are bosses to the Kathmandu staff, who in turn are bosses to the NGO staff. Every interaction and correspondence between them reinforces this hierarchy. As for their ‘target beneficiaries’, in whose name the show runs, their job is to listen, accept, smile in front of the camera and provide information for reports and success stories.
For all their weaknesses, district-based NGOs have one solid advantage over Kathmandu and Head Office staff: physical and cultural proximity to the local community. If Al were truly committed to its professed aim, its top brass would ensure that these local NGOs voiced, defended and engaged with the community’s real interests at all cost. But at every ‘capacity building’ training of NGOs, Kathmandu staff hammers the same message into the heads of NGO staff: the donors’ command is unquestionable, inviolable.
Behind the backs of their Kathmandu bosses, NGO staff often admit how useless and at times damaging Al has been for its ‘beneficiaries’. But at meetings and conferences, amid smart, English-speaking Kathmandu colleagues and white experts, these district-based people feel so insignificant that they are reduced to head~nodding dummies. Yes, the project has failed miserably, they think, but we must do as we are told. We can’t mess with the hand that feeds us.
The Kathmandu staff, of course, could have changed this reality if they really willed it. They could at least speak out, reject readymade tools and solutions, decide where the funds would be spent and how, and refuse to endorse the donors’ misconceptions. But they will do none of this because we don’t want to risk anything - not our salary, not our comfort, nor our chances for promotion and international travel. Which leads me to confess that, yes, I am a staff member of Aid International. As an ordinary middle-class woman in Kathmandu, I realised sometime ago that the surest means to secure my financial independence, live comfortably and give my children the best education is to work in an INGO. Besides, I belong to a nation whose leaders bow to the wisdom of donors where even principled citizens are forced to reap the harvest of dollar kheti [dollar girl] every now and then. How, then, could an average person like me, with average dreams and desires, resist its pull? I have thus sold myself to Aid International. I, like many others, have surrendered to the inescapable power of aidocracy."
S.Gurung fails to understand how projects are funded but broadly speaking I found most of her comments entirely valid. I wish more would speak out against the racket that I see going on around me.
I do love The Kathmandu Post. In today's edition it advises us that tonight is the night to witness Comet Lulin. After informing readers that the Comet follows a parabolic course through the universe that takes 50 million years the journalist - without the slightest hint of irony - says that it won't be visible again for "the foreseeable future".
