Accounting for the NGO cash

 What do NGOs do? What are NGOs?

It’s a good question. According to the World Bank’s Operational Directive 14.70, “NGOs include a wide variety of groups and institutions that are entirely or largely independent of government, and characterized primarily by humanitarian or cooperative, rather than commercial, objectives” in poor countries.

But that’s still a pretty broad tent. And it begs the question of why they exist. Not why the totally private NGOs exist — that’s fairly obvious. No, the non-obvious question is why governments channel so much of their aid to poor countries through NGOs. Two billion dollars in government aid goes through these organizations. Werker and Ahmed provide a pretty good overview of what NGOs do, but (at their own admission) not a lot of evidence about how well they do it, and there is a little too much implicit market triumphalism in their account. There is much to be said for the NGOs’ ability to combine public and private assistance, but they do so at the expense of accountability.

In Haiti, there are millions of dollars floating around Port-au-Prince, collected by NGOs in the name of the Haitian people. My tour guide at one of the tent-camps is the founder (and sole force behind) Haiti Aid Watchdog.  My host, if he can get the money to do it, wants to basically audit the NGOs. (Yes, there is an irony in having an NGO audit the NGOs.)

The problems he faces get my blood up. First, NGOs neither open their books nor make available online reports on their expenditures. They were all supposed to prepare such reports 60 days after the earthquake; none did. Second, the NGO headquarters totally ignore him, because he is just a Haitian citizen without political clout. He shows up at an NGO headquarters in Port-au-Prince and they ask “where is your mandate?”. He’s a Haitian citizen. THAT’S HIS MANDATE. But because of the imbalance in power, respect, and resources, he can’t get any of the big NGOs (e.g. World Vision) to release information. Finally, he can’t get any funding, despite the tremendous amounts of cash swishing around the country.

It’s a problem with the non-governmental “governance” that supplements (or even replaces) the state in so much of the world. Any ideas?

Comments

[bodzin]

There are some U.S. jurisdictions where nonprofit organizations (the U.S. term for charitable NGOs) have to comply with transparency laws. Here's a little roundup:
http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2038:nonprofits-transparency-and-sunshine&catid=149:rick-cohen&Itemid=117

Does Haiti have a transparency law? It might be hard to impose it on organizations that are present of their own will rather than as contractors, as some would probably leave. But that may be better than having parasites around.