By Richard Phinney
Radio NetherlandsDecember 5, 2002
Channelling aid money through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is a worldwide trend. But nowhere has the strategy been taken further than Bangladesh. Here, in some villages, you can send your child to an NGO school, have a vasectomy arranged by an NGO health worker, sell your milk to an NGO dairy, and talk on an NGO phone. And there's usually a choice of several NGO banks. There's even NGO entertainment.
Whether the explosion in the number of NGOs in Bangladesh represents the wave of the future or a case of foreign aid run riot, is a question that increasingly divides Bangladeshis themselves. But it's a scenario many developing countries will face as donors look for alternatives to supporting government programmes that they perceive to be inefficient or corrupt.
Good example
"The NGO scene in Bangladesh is very different from other countries," says Ian Smillie, author of several books on the voluntary sector in Africa, Asia and Latin America. "Several of these organisations have become very large, very professional, and they've become a model for others. Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world and the last place you would have expected this to happen, has really become a leader in showing what the voluntary sector can do."
To get an idea on the scale of the NGO community in Bangladesh you need to go to the capital, Dhaka - and look up. The 19 storey BRAC Centre (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) is the headquarters of the largest NGO in the world, with over 100,000 people on the payroll, all of them Bangladeshi. In addition to their schools and the thousands of teachers, BRAC employs health workers, computer analysts and thousands of bankers.
Hunger
The BRAC Centre looks more like the headquarters of an oil company than an NGO. But then Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC, was an company executive for Shell. He quit his job during Bangladesh's war of Independence from Pakistan, and founded BRAC as a small relief operation. Then came the Bangladesh famine in 1974.
"We wanted to save as many lives as possible. We were seeing children dying like flies. So we wanted to feed them back to health. We were feeding around 20,000 children twice a day to try and keep them alive. But it was the women who were taking the brunt of the hunger in the family. They are hungry themselves, they are trying to feed their children by begging or collecting or whatever."
Government responsibility
To begin with BRAC received small grants from the Dutch aid agency Novib and a few other organizations in the West. But in the 1980s the money really started to flow, as donors in North America and Europe grew fed up with the military regimes that then ruled Bangladesh.
Ian Smillie often evaluates programs in Bangladesh for international donors. "A lot of people say; How come a voluntary organization has 30,000 schools; this is something the government should do. But is it something the government should do? The government wasn't doing it and the government wouldn't have done it if the donor money hadn't been available to BRAC to do it. They've got a million kids in schools, that means a million more literate adults, 5 years or 10 years from now, than would have been the case if everybody had sat around waiting for the government to do it."
More than a thousand NGOs in Bangladesh now receive foreign funding. Advocates of NGOs can point to some truly impressive statistics. Life expectancy has risen by 12 years. Female literacy rates of doubled. Bangladesh can now feed itself. Most surprising of all, family sizes have been cut in half.
Decline in public services
But some critics think the negative long-term consequences to Bangladeshi society may outweigh the short-term gain. Rehman Sobhan of Dhaka's Centre for Policy Dialogue is one of Bangladesh's best known intellectuals. He argues that public services have suffered, as NGOs have grown larger.
"The reality of the matter is that NGOs cannot substitute the government any more than the private sector can. What has happened is a loss of ideological sustainability and a de-legitimisation of governments, who have become more cut off, both from a sense of self worth, but also from the notion that they have a significant contribution to make. So whilst this may not have been the intention of the donor community, the objective results have been not just a downsizing, but also a devaluation of the state. And an increasing reliance, at least in the social sector, on NGOs which has become a counterproductive exercise."
One of the most active supporters of NGOs in Bangladesh has been The Netherlands, which has contributed tens of millions of euros over the last three decades. Jurjen van der Tas helped run the Bangladesh program for the Dutch agency Novib for more than a decade. "Normally one would expect that some of these things are provided by the government, particularly the basic social services, water, sanitation, education and health. Ideally, these NGOs would work themselves out of a job, so that, at some point, they would no longer be necessary. But by and large Bangladesh is not really at that level yet."
In the meantime, there's little sign that Western donors have the patience to fund the long-term rebuilding of government services, whether in Bangladesh, Afghanistan or in other troubled parts of the developing world. NGOs in other countries may not grow as big or as quickly as they have in Bangladesh, but they are, no doubt, here to stay.
More Information on NGOs
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