FOOD: NGO Ability To Tackle Crisis Situations Questioned

By Lahai J. Samboma Reprint | | Print |

Lahai J. Samboma and Darius Bazargan

LONDON, Jan 20 1996 (IPS) - Calls to involve NGOs in efforts to increase global food security in the run-up to a major summit in Rome in November come as some analysts are questioning the effectiveness of policies that rely on NGOs to implement them.

Addressing a meeting of NGOs in London this week FAO Director- General Jacques Diouf told a meeting on summit preparations here this week that FAO recognised that partnerships with other groups was ‘indispensable’.

“We want to establish a network of partnerships with each country and between the countries and the international community.” he said. “NGOs, private business, government and multilateral and bilateral development agencies will need to work together and coordinate their actions.”

But some analysts say many programmes aimed at alleviating poverty in developing countries — many focussing on food security schemes — can fail to reach the poorest people.

“Conventional wisdom asserts that NGOs are particularly good at reaching the poorest, but this view has to be challenged in the light of our research,” said Roger Riddell, a senior research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute.

Riddell was speaking at the recent launch of his book ‘Non- Governmental Organisations and Rural Poverty Alleviation’.

The study, which looks at 16 poverty alleviation programmes involving British NGOs in Bangladesh, India, Uganda and Zimbabwe, comes as donor countries and institutions try to evaluate the development impact of NGOs in the poorest countries.

“Most of the projects failed to reach the very poorest, and even in cases where poverty alleviation occurred, improvement in economic status was modest and there was little evidence to suggest that people had escaped permanently from poverty,” Riddell said.

He says that although 12 of the projects broadly achieved their objectives and succeeded in reducing poverty, only one achieved all its goals, and few were able to continue after external funding was withdrawn.

In only five of the 16 projects were the benefits judged to have outweighed the costs of the intervention, while in others very high proportions of aid budgets were taken up by administration costs.

Such programmes could be made more effective only when more preparatory work was done, more funding was provided and when there was greater participation by the recipients, according to Mark Robinson, co-author of the report and a Fellow at Sussex University.