Hugh Goyder
Development Policy Management Forum BulletinDecember 1994
Is Partnership still Valid and Feasible?
International NGO's have a mixed experience of partnership. The word became fashionable during the 1980's as Southern NGO's became more critical of their Northern partners, and traditional dependency relationships between donors and recipients were questioned. In the 1990's, new relationships are emerging, with increasing collaboration between Northern NGO's and international development agencies, and some direct funding from official donors to Southern NGO's.
While the concept of partnership remains valid, most NGO's face real difficulties in making the concept fully operational. True partnership implies a compatibility of vision, aims, and objectives between the two sides which is all too rare in practice. However, the relationship remains essentially unequal, with one side retaining the right to disburse or withhold funding, and thus, the real power.
In addition, most international NGO's have become increasingly interventionist over the last ten years with a wide range of policies on issues like gender, the environment, and human rights. It seems likely that official donors who now talk about the need for partnership will face similar contradictions to NGO's.
In spite of these difficulties, the concept of partnership still has real value as a philosophy underlying institutional development. Its key value lies in the assumption of a relationship that goes beyond funding, to a real long-term commitment to the development of national organisations.
Real partnership requires joint strategic planning and agreement on objectives and indicators by which progress is measured. Once a relationship is established, problems can be openly acknowledged and addressed before they become overwhelming. There is much scope for learning by both sides.
Are NGO's less Constrained than Donors?
NGO's like Actionaid implement a large proportion of their projects themselves. However, sustained implementation requires that we establish partnerships with a wide variety of local organisations -- government agencies at all levels, other NGO's, and community level organisations.
Operational work of this kind means that we have to make the same choices at the micro-level as official donors at the national level. For instance we frequently have to choose between, say, providing our own 'alternative' agricultural extension or health service, or by a longer process of lobbying and advocacy, to persuade the government to provide the same service. Our long-term funding base is derived largely from individual sponsors who make a commitment of support for a period of between five and ten years. This secure funding base makes it possible for us to avoid rigid implementation schedules and to adopt longer-term strategies.
Nevertheless, NGO's are not immune from the problems of accountability faced by official donors. Actionaid, in common with most similar NGO's, has developed a system of financial accountability, with strong internal financial controls, regular internal and external audits, and strict financial reporting schedules. This is combined with close monitoring and periodic reviews of programme strategies.
However, the stronger the system of accountability to our trustees and donors in the UK, the more difficult it is to honour our accountability to the communities with whom we work directly and the wider society of which these communities are a part. This problem is shared by all intermediary agencies trying to implement projects at community level and using funds from increasingly inquisitive donors concerned about the use of their funds. While there are no easy answers, our experience suggests the following:
Actionaid's Experience
In any NGO project, the majority of the staff need to feel accountable to the needs of communities, rather than following rigid schedules and 'getting things done'. This means that from the start of the project the NGO needs to establish a clear philosophy to let the community determine its own priorities and set the pace. This often means that in the first year of a project, not much tangible happens, apart from training and recruiting staff, and conducting meetings, surveys, and participatory appraisal exercises. This time is essential in order to ensure that the community feels a sense of ownership of the project in the long-term: even so, some official donors reject NGO proposals that emphasise this sort of approach because they cannot see practical (and measurable) benefits reaching communities fast enough.
Staff should ideally be drawn from the immediate project area and they need to live and work in the communities as much as possible. In the past, Actionaid projects were set up on sectoral lines with largely sectoral objectives. In recent years many have moved over to a more decentralised and area-based approach, which often involves a much greater management challenge, but allows many more opportunities for the community to take over the project's management.
Operational NGO's have for too long by-passed local government and other local structures, and have often weakened these structures further by recruiting their staff at higher salaries. So far, much of the debate about capacity-building has concerned national-level institutions, and local government has been relatively neglected. NGO's need to work both on the 'demand' side (helping communities to be more productive and to demand better and more consistent government services) but equally on the 'supply' side -- working with line ministries and other authorities at both the provincial and local level to ensure that they have both the qualified manpower, funds, and equipment to work effectively. Only in those relatively few countries facing complete economic and political collapse should NGO's try to take on these functions themselves.
Once these community-level structures are in place, it is important not to over-burden field workers with excessive reporting requirements. A 'bureaucratic culture' is increasing in many NGO's, especially in Africa, to the extent that too many field staff are stuck behind desks writing proposals and reports for donors. The accountability requirements of each staff member need to be made very clear, so that only the project manager and a few senior staff have to spend time on 'upward' accountability requirements; and community-based staff should then be free to work with, and within, their communities.
Within such a structure, the concerns of donors and agency staff about whether or not a project is 'effective' can best be met by involving communities in setting objectives and identifying performance indicators. Internal monitoring can be verified by periodic evaluations that use the indicators identified by the community, as well as those of the agency.
There are real dangers, given the growth in numbers of NGO's and the difficulty they increasingly face in accessing funds, that more NGO's will become 'contractors' in the way that many American NGO's have become contractors for USAID. The main danger in NGO's accepting such contracts is that they will, in the end, be far more sensitive to their donors' accountability requirements than those of the people they should be serving.
Implications for Other Aid Donors
Not all of these experiences may be relevant for official donors. There are however some useful indications:
The need to review the 'aid business' from a recipients' perspective. A sense of ownership of any project by the local implementing agency is as crucial at the national, as at the community level. The present multiplicity of donors, their diverse reporting requirements, and increasingly complex conditionalities, threatens the capacity of national governments to cope with aid itself, and leaves them little space for their own development policies. It is entirely legitimate for donors to impose conditions on aid disbursement, but they need to be more transparent as to what strategies underlay these conditionalities: the British ODA has recently announced that it will in future disclose its strategic priorities in different countries.
The need for far more decentralisation by official donors. The need for 'upward' accountability is insufficient justification for the centralised approach of some donors, including the European Union (EU). In this regard, the delegation of authority by donors like the British ODA to regionally-based Development Divisions appears a positive development. National capacity-building will remain little more than a slogan unless the donor community within each country is given a clear mandate to work with other donors to achieve this objective.
The need for simpler, and more transparent procedures for disbursing aid. There is a real risk that at least in the case of the EU, low rates of disbursement will be blamed on the ACP countries, when a major cause may be delays in decision-making in the EU itself. As regards the EU's funding of NGO's, most NGO's now experience lengthy and worsening delays in securing funding decisions from Brussels. There appears to be no clear division of labour between Brussels and the delegations; the procedures by which proposals are assessed are unclear; and the criteria by which they are accepted or rejected often appear arbitrary.
Official donors who award contracts to NGO's for specific services at a community level must realise that their own particular accountability requirements are necessary but never sufficient, and they must find ways to verify the extent of community involvement in the NGO's work.
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