NGO’s

The work of non-governmental organisations.

NGO’s

• Raise money from voluntary and private sources to fund projects in developing countries.

• Free from government interference.

• Determine for themselves what their aims an policies are.

• They provide emergency relief at times of crisis and are most obviously in the public eye at these times when they are involved in high profile fund raising, for example famines in Ethiopia and Sudan.

• NGO’s provide around 10% of all the aid in Africa.

• Many of them have specialist skills and help raise awareness of the issues affecting Africa.

• NGO’s work in partnerships with other bodies providing short term and long term aid.

• There are hundreds of NGO’s

• As a class we will focus on three

• Christian Aid, Action aid and Save the Children.

Your Task

• In groups you must choose a NGO which interests you from the three we have discussed.

• You are going teach the rest of the class about the kind of work this NGO carries out.

Your teaching should include.

• The aims of the NGO you have chosen.

• What the NGO do and what types of programmes have they been involved in. Give examples of countries!! Say whether the projects are small or large scale.

• You have one period to complete this task

How effective are NGO’s ?• If we are looking for how

effective NGO’S are we need examine various factors:

• Numbers of NGO’s at work and what problems this can cause.

• Aid not targeted to those most in need.

• Slow to act and inefficiency

• Reliance on international organisations for finance.

• Corruption

Numbers of NGO’s• There are hundreds of

NGO’s and at times this can cause problems.

• In Rwanda after the genocide, there were 170 NGO’s at work in the country meaning more often than not they were duplicating the work they do.

• As well as this they were competing against each other for donations.

Aid not targeted• NGO’s are criticised for not targeting

the poorest people.

• In Tanzania, Action aid was criticised for not doing enough to help those in rural areas.

Slow to act

• At times NGO’s are criticised for being slow to act and inefficient.

• Many say that NGO’s ran by enthusiastic amateurs.

• In Malawi in 2002 NGO’s such as Christian aid took to long to react that by the time they did the country had a bumper harvest!

Reliance on International Organisations

• Despite the fact that Christian Aid claim to work independently, they have relied on the finance from other agencies such as the EU and DFID.

• They helped to fund projects in southern Africa during the famine in 2002 in countries such as Zimbabwe and Angola.

• NGO’s have limited resources and are often unable to carry out large scale projects of International Organisations.

Corruption• NGO’s have no means to protect aid

as much of the aid is stolen, as seen when Christian aid claimed that aid was taken by the ruling elite in Zimbabwe.

Conclusions ??• NGO’s do carry out

vital work in Africa and help to raise awareness of the issues affecting Africa.

• Make poverty History campaign used and mobilized public support to persuade politicians to cancel debt to many poor African countries Tanzania and Somalia.

• It could be argued that NGO’s have little control over their finances therefore they find it difficult to plan ahead.

• It could be said that they have a little impact in comparison to the UN and DFID, due to the fact that they struggle to fund large scale projects without support.