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| Charity begins in self-interest |
| Sreelatha Menon / New Delhi Sep 02, 2010, 00:34 IST |
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What could be problematic about charity by rich countries? Isn’t it the most natural thing for a rich nation to help poor neighbours? It is widely accepted that things are more complicated than that. When charity comes from foreign countries to the government or to NGOs, it is not just altruism that drives it but mostly self-interest and, in fact, extending grants is not charity at all. That is what the book Foreign Aid to NGOs: Problem or Solution? concludes in its critique of all foreign aid directed to non-profit organisations in the country over the last five decades.
Pushpa Sundar, the author who is also the co-founder of the Sampradan Indian Centre for Philanthropy, puts together arguments for and against foreign aid in the context of the three players — the government, NGOs and donors. She speaks from every possible angle with a dash of irony and humour that makes the book a good read despite the swathes of names, numbers and other data related to grants and funds the reader has to cut through.
The book traces the link between self-interest and aid to the very origin of official development aid by rich nations. For instance, Western Official Development Assistance had two origins — the US fear of communist extremism and European imperialistic politics. For the US aid was an extension of the Cold War containment policy towards the poorer nations of Asia, Africa and southern Europe; for European donors, the aid was directed at their former colonies.
Sundar also raises the question of who should benefit from aid, the government or the NGOs, and she notes that aid that used to flow to the government more than to the NGOs in the early part of the last five decades has now been flowing more to the NGOs. In some countries, aid to NGOs has led to the rise of a parallel state amenable to foreign influence. This has not happened in India, thanks partly to the size of the country, the author says, adding that the government also had a role to play in preventing donors from hijacking the development agenda.
The book goes on to defend the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act and the bilateral aid policy which have been strongly criticised by NGOs and donors alike. The author says that the Act, despite defects like encouraging corrupt practices and using law enforcement authorities rather than the finance ministry to scrutinise financial irregularities, has probably not been responsible for reducing flow of foreign aid as NGOs suggest. She says aid is not determined by the ease with which beneficiaries can access it but the desire of the donor to give it.
She also sees merit in the government’s bilateral aid policy announced in 2003 which upset both donors and NGOs alike. The government announced that India would not accept any tied aid in future and also restricted donors to the government to the Big Six, eliminating all small aid packages of bilateral aid. However, the policy left the donors free to directly aid the NGOs but donors chose to withdraw rather than take this offer. The author notes that the donors prefer to work with the government, rather than the NGOs, as their primary contact in the social sector for various reasons such as ready infrastructure, sustainability of the project, ease of scaling up and so on. But she adds another significant reason, which is probably driving the new trends in the social sector and charity: “Some disillusionment with NGOs as the best agency for social change has set in… .”
Next on the author’s agenda, she says, is a book on the market as the funder of NGOs. That is also the direction that the NGO sector is already poised to take and the final chapter of the book gives a glimpse of this trend. The world of venture capitalists, philanthro-capitalists, social enterprises, social entrepreneurs, these are new names for the same social and development action groups that have been so far operating under the label of NGOs.
They are the new world that is already visible on the horizon to Sundar, making her critique of the post-Independence NGO funding seem like an early obituary to a chapter of dependence and “unsustainable” methods of social work.
The book’s strength is its ability to accommodate the maximum that can be said on donor charity. But that also is its weakness since it does not allow the reader the luxury to examine the details of the many things she briefly mentions. Each chapter gives sufficient glimpse of issues without saying enough about each of them.
Microfinance, which has emerged as the biggest poverty alleviation effort in the country in this decade, does not find much mention and probably would find a place in her next book when she dwells on the market as the big funder — a direction in which many big microfinance institutes in the country are now headed.
FOREIGN AID TO NGOS: PROBLEM OR SOLUTION?
Pushpa Sundar
Routledge
363 pages
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