CIVIL SOCIETY: A Way to Give, A Way to Take

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

GLASGOW, May 25 2007 (IPS) - That shortcut has been waiting a while, to be used more often. That governments and other donors in the North begin to fund civil society in the South directly, and not route the money through northern NGOs.

Norway, among the major donors, is now considering that shift closely. Jan-Petter Holtedahl, from the civil society department of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, told a meeting at the CIVICUS world assembly in Glasgow that “direct support” is now being considered, on the strength of several studies to show that vast amounts of aid are currently routed through NGOs in the North.

The cost-saving and perhaps time-saving in such a move would be immediately evident. Major agencies like Oxfam and ActionAid usually speak of a need to spend 15 percent of funds raised on maintaining themselves, among other things just to raise the money they do for the causes they support.

Skipping the northern NGO along the way cuts that cost, but could well cut off possibilities of raising the money in the first place. The world of fundraising is way too complex for any clear indication yet whether donors would put up that money without advocacy from the North, or whether civil society in the South could find the means to lobby donors directly.

Other changes are appearing. “We want increased coordination, and we’re looking at multi-donor trust funds,” said Holtedahl. “These did enhance cooperation and collaboration, a form of dialogue, even though those funds reflected a fraction of total support in that country. They are also a risk sharing device; the down side is that they are often slow.”

But the creation of multi-donor trust funds again increases possibilities that civil society organisations in the South could approach such a fund directly, bypassing the equations that northern NGOs form with their governments and other multilateral agencies like UN organisations and the World Bank.

It is in any event time for the South to find more a place for itself when, and where, funding decisions are taken.

“Being inclusive is about having everybody on the designing table, not in London or Washington designing a project about someone in Africa,” said Abiola Tilley-Gyado, managing director for international development at PLAN International in Senegal, an agency supporting the needs of children.

“Somebody with a one-month internship in Zimbabwe becomes an expert on Africa who decides what funding should go where. We need to find out from people what their problems are. We do not want someone to talk of food shortage, and so call in the World Food Programme, to send wheat to people who don’t know how to eat wheat,” said Tilley-Gyado.

But that question still lingers, who should listen first: The northern NGO or the northern donor. In the world of civil society, a lot can hang on that question.

“A lot of government funding goes to NGOs from their own country,” outgoing Civicus president Aruna Rao told IPS. “In Norway itself, the overwhelming amount of money from their NGO budget goes to Norwegian NGOs, who then do work in southern countries, or who on-fund southern NGOs.”

A change certainly should be considered, she said. “It’s useful to have new sorts of mechanisms for international, regional, southern, local NGOs, to be able to access funding from these governments.”

Sylvia Borren, director of Oxfam-Novib in the Netherlands says it might be too early for that, because it is northern NGOs raising the money in the first place.

“In the future I would like countries in the South to have an elite and a middle class to begin proper fundraising for social causes in their own countries. While there is some of that happening, more from the super-rich than from the middle classes, it’s not yet a lot of the kind of fundraising we do in the Netherlands for instance.”

And there are political thorns on that shortcut, she told IPS.

“The worry I have is that northern governments are able to control southern civil society more than they can control their own civil society. Sometimes this de-politicises the social movements and the NGOs themselves. So sometimes some of the multi-fund coordination means that southern NGOs are used more for service delivery than for structure advocacy or other such work,” Borren said.

“It worries me if we as civil society globally are being put up against each other as northern and southern. I’ve seen some southern NGOs take funds from the EU in this way, and falling down by the wayside because the actual accountability was very arduous, and complicated, and awful. And they ended up being a sub-contractor of the European Union, instead of being a good, strong, autonomous, critical civil society.”

There is now a tendency to corporate more, as with the multi-donor fund, Borren said. “I think that has good sides, because the partner doesn’t have to have 17 different reports to write. The bad side may be that some of the smaller civil society and social movement organisations are missing out, because it’s the more established, bigger NGOs who can cope with that kind of multi-donor funding.”

Giving and taking is always a messy business. On that scale, there can be as much mess as there are transactions.