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http://www.irinnews.org/report/101603/ngos-bridging-the-north-south-divide
SOUTHERN NGO’S FORM NETWORK TO INCREASE VOICE, HUMANITARIAN AID, MORE INCLUSIVENESS & POWER BALANCE - GENDER
Photo: ALNAP
By
Louise Redvers
DUBAI, 8
June 2015 (IRIN) - It’s an age-old story of money and power that breeds
mistrust and resentment. But can relations between major donors in the west and
local humanitarian agencies in the global south be changed to everyone’s
benefit?
A key challenge is the widely-held perception that northern and western donors
often lack faith in southern actors’ ability to deliver aid effectively; that
due to increasingly stringent financial monitoring, it’s too risky to give
small or “local” organisations cash because they can’t prove how they’ll spend
it.
Southern NGOs, meanwhile, bemoan northern organisations’ tendency to barrel
into crisis situations disregarding local knowledge and contexts and applying
impractical solutions without proper community consultation.
Other gripes include: international NGOs poaching the best staff from local
organisations (preventing smaller actors from building up capacity and impact);
northern charities hogging the media limelight for work carried out by
“partners”; and the practice of holding all coordination meetings in English
whatever the vernacular.
A new network
In a bid to address some of these
imbalances, perceived or otherwise, a new global network of southern NGOs is
being proposed and was announced last week at a leading humanitarian forum in
New York.
“Crises and needs are at the local level in local areas, yet the funding comes
from foreign governments to largely foreign agencies,” complained Degan Ali,
executive director of Nairobi-based African Development Solutions (Adeso) and
one of the main forces behind the idea.
“We have come to regard western NGOs as ‘international’ and the rest of the
world as ‘local’,” she told IRIN. “When so-called ‘northern NGOs’ engage with
‘southern actors’ it’s rarely a partnership, it’s more of a sub-contract.”
Ali, whose organisation runs aid and
development programmes in Somalia, Kenya and South Sudan, wants the
relationship and power balance to change and is leading the call to set up a
new global network for non-northern NGOs.
The idea of the network, which she hopes will be formally launched at the World
Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in June next year, is to bring non-western and
non-northern organisations together for purposes of advocacy, capacity building
and, down the line, funding allocation.
“One of the biggest problems is that we [southern actors] don’t have a seat at
the tables where decisions are being made,” she said, adding that it was time
more money went directly to local organisations rather than through foreign
agencies.
“How are we going to teach local NGOs to be the custodians of money and to be
responsible if we are always being micro-managed and not given the opportunity
to manage that money ourselves?” Ali asked. “How do you teach someone to swim
if you don’t allow them in the pool?”
Addressing imbalances
The announcement about the network comes
after extensive consultation among southern NGOs, who laid out their
frustrations about the aid system in a May 2015 report commissioned by Adeso.
One of the organisations backing the idea is the Bangladesh-based Coastal
Association for Social Transformation Trust (COAST).
"A southern NGO network is imperative to bringing the southern community
voice to international policy discourse, and to correcting the power imbalance
in humanitarian aid efforts,” noted COAST executive director Rezaul Karim
Chowdhury.
At the heart of the debate is funding.
According to research
by UK-based data house Development Initiatives, between 2009 and 2013, local
and national NGOs received just 1.6 percent of the humanitarian aid provided by
international donors, equivalent to just 0.2 percent of overall humanitarian
funding during that period.
This was despite the marked increase in activity by local actors responding to
emergencies such as the war in Syria, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the
Haiti earthquake.
Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, secretary general of global civil society network
CIVICUS, agreed that southern organisations should have more say, be more
involved in humanitarian and development responses, and receive more direct
funding.
“A vast majority of NGO resources are controlled or administered by northern
founded and northern funded agencies,” he said.
“In recent years, there have been huge changes to the global geopolitical and
economic landscape, but if you look at the civil society landscape and at who
controls the money, the resources, the power and the profile, it strikes me as
far less transformed… that we are a bit behind in civil society compared to
what’s happening in business or international politics.”
Johannesburg-based Sriskandarajah
acknowledged that some northern organisations were making “great progress.” He
cited Action Aid, which has moved its international secretariat to South Africa
and has a number of other southern operations hubs, as an example, but said there
was “still a rump for whom this (moving south) was a problem.”
“It needs a more conscious effort by all of us in civil society to adopt an
almost ‘head south’ strategy,” he said. “It is something we need to make happen
consciously. It’s about nurturing southern organisations, giving them the
resources and the capacity and empowering them to act.”
From 2017, Oxfam International also plans to split its headquarters, currently
in Oxford in the UK, between Nairobi and Bangkok in order to achieve a better
north-south balance.
Money to develop capacity
Mercy Malaysia president Ahmad Faizal
Perdaus told IRIN that despite large northern and western donors being
“philosophically and ideologically committed” to supporting local
organisations, money continued to be given only to a small pool of
international (usually non-southern) NGOs with a view to letting it trickle
down to local actors.
Faizal, who is also the chair of the International Council of Voluntary
Agencies (ICVA), said the trickle-down approach wasn’t working, and that while
not every NGO had to be big, even smaller organisations need a chance to grow
their capacity to be able to upscale and improve.
“Southern NGOs are not entirely blameless,” he added. “Very few actually take
proactive steps to improve their capacity themselves without waiting for help
from outside.”
Ali explained that while the planned network
would initially focus on advocacy and capacity building, she hoped it could
also become a funding “broker” to help direct money from large donors to
smaller southern NGOs, who often get overlooked due to their lack of profile or
perceived risk.
“We are not going to be able to address the
issues of power, resources and implementation unless we also address the issue
of financing,” she explained.
“We are so tired of training by northern NGOs and UN agencies. What we really
need is unrestricted money to develop our capacity. We need money that will
help pay the rent, be there for the long term, not just for quick projects.”
One of
the barriers to southern NGOs – local and international – getting money from
northern donors is the perception of risk, and a lack of capacity to comply
with rigourous due diligence and accountability procedures.
“At the end of the day, it comes to trust,” said Sriskandarajah. “There’s risk
in all of what we do and at some stage you have to trust say the Ugandans to be
able to sort things out themselves without a London-based organisation managing
the grant and dispersing the funds or reports to donors.”
Positive or negative change?
Although Faizal welcomed Adeso’s network
idea in principle, he had some reservations about how well it would work in
practice.
“While I don’t think you’d find anybody strongly objecting to it, be they in
the north, south, east or west, I think you might find people questioning its
purpose and issues of sustainability, viability and feasibility.
“Perhaps we can get one or two donors for a year, but will we be able to have
them in the longer term?”
Faizal also warned that the south was not exactly one homogenous entity and
that cultural differences between the various regional organisations could
create leadership challenges.
“When we talk about the global south, where exactly are we talking about? East
Africa? Southeast Asia? West Africa? Middle East? Central and South Asia?”
“It will have to be thought out very carefully to ensure it works to the
benefit and not the detriment of the entire system and southern NGOs
specifically,” he said.
“The elephant in the room is that this network ends up being viewed negatively,
not just by people in the west and the north but also by southern
organisations. It could further divide the system and it will not solve the
problems.”
Anne Street, head of humanitarian policy at CAFOD, which has been lobbying hard
for more localised aid funding and contributed to the recently-published Future
Humanitarian Financing report, told IRIN: “I very much support the idea of the
formation of a strong southern network.
“Obviously it will take some time to get off the ground, and it will need
careful leadership, but I really support the concept and thinking behind it. It
is certainly needed.”
Discussions about bridging the divide between northern and
southern NGOs, and improving funding flows, have featured prominently at
consultation events in the run-up to the WHS, including at last week’s Global
Forum for Improving Humanitarian Action in New York.
“The implicit goal of humanitarian aid is soft power and until we address that,
until we create a humanitarian system that is for global public good, we are
not going to be able change anything,” Ali told IRIN.
“This is not about replacing western NGOs with southern NGOs. It’s about
changing how we work.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Global Network
of Southern NGOs Report – Direct Link to Full 32-Page 2015 Report:
http://adesoafrica.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/GlobalNetworkReport_April-2015.pdf
REPORT CALLS FOR LOCAL NGO’S TO HAVE GREATER SAY IN HUMANITARIAN
EFFORTS
A Global
Network of Southern NGOs Finds Widespread Support, reveals Report.
The report
finds that there is strong support for a global network of SNGOs that would
help strengthen and focus capacity building efforts, enable mutual learning,
advance advocacy and deepen the evidence base on Southern engagement” A global
network of SNGOs could contribute to improved capacity strengthening efforts,
providing a valuable means by which to engage a broader constituency of actors
in humanitarian, recovery and resilience efforts, and providing a unique
platform that is ‘for SNGOs, run by SNGOs’,” she concluded.
The report warns that with the escalating threat of climate change, as well as rapid urbanization, the number and complexity of disasters is on the rise making the capacitation of local and national actors all the more critical if the formal sector is going to be able to cope with a rapidly growing humanitarian caseload.