Jeanette and I originally wrote this as an endpaper for Bhumi Magazine, a undergraduate journal of international development. Because it overlaps too much with other articles in the issue, we'll be reworking it tonight, but I liked the original too much to just let it sit on my dusty computer . . .

Sobering Up: A Look at NGOs on the Morning After
By Y. Jeanette Park and Jacob L. Bryant

When you ask Harvard students what they want to do after graduation, many will answer that they want to “change the world” and, if they’re amongst the Bhumi-set, to “work for an NGO” to bring “development” and a better life to the poor of the world. For us, these NGOs represent havens of positive social change in a harsh world otherwise driven by private interests. But the last six months in Mexico, Hong Kong and in South Africa have questioned our perceptions on the role of NGOs in realizing development and our previous belief that NGOs ought to be part-and-parcel of every development policy.

Being on the ground where these NGOs are supposed to be effecting positive change reveals a far different picture than the glowing testimonies of program participants featured prominently on their websites. One problem, immediately striking even from far-away Cambridge, might be the general lack of accountability for NGOs to the goals which they set out to achieve. Private donors, aid agencies, and host governments often have few if any means to know if an NGO does what it says and if this is done effectively. A relative minority of NGOs makes any systematic effort to evaluate the impact of their services on the communities in which they are situated; neither do many people demand that they do so, under the blanket assumption that NGOs always do good. At its worst, this lack of accountability breeds gross-mismanagement and even outright corruption.

While none of us would set out intending to run corrupt or ineffective NGOs, for well-educated and well-resourced young people sympathetic to humanitarian causes, the career track of a “professional NGO worker” is a pitfall in itself. Earning a comfortable salary, attending conferences around the globe, hosting black-tie fundraising dinners, and speaking at universities, the career of a professional NGO worker allows us to claim that we are helping the poor while maintaining a jet-setting lifestyle. While none of these things in themselves are problematic, together they give rise to a bona-fide class or “development set,” with vested interests in ensuring that their organizations continue to exist and are perceived as important, whether or not the needs of their communities match the services they provide.

Among the most devastating consequences of this rent-seeking behavior by NGOs is the manner in which the causes and leadership of poorer communities are usurped by the very NGOs who ostensibly seek to serve them. Rather than acting as facilitators to home-grown movements and organizations, NGOs often do them a disservice by co-opting their causes and hiring their leadership, putting both out of touch with grassroots interests. Here again, no NGO takes over a grassroots movement consciously intending to demobilize it, but movement ownership shifts to the better-educated NGO staff in something of a “leave it to the professionals” coup. At the root of this lie both an attitude on the part of many NGOs that they know better than the communities themselves and a need to justify their own existence.

One might suggest that these problems hinge on a misdirected view of development on the part of these NGOs or that their leadership is poor, but we doubt that this is the case. Many who lead these organizations were probably not so different from ourselves when they started, matching both our idealism and our enthusiasm. Neither do we make the claim that no NGO contributes any good to the world. Rather, we mean to suggest that the environment in which NGOs operate allows mismanagement and spawns rent-seeking. We should not reserve an unqualified praise for the work of NGOs in our surveys of the development landscape. They should instead be viewed rather as parties to a political economy of development and even as a part of a “development industry,” with their own idealism but also with their own interests. So to students who want to do good in the world by working in an NGO: think carefully, understand their work and its consequences, and stop congratulating yourselves.