WARRIOR FOR THE BETTERMENT OF THE SOCIETY
“NGOs have a complicated space in neoliberal politics. They are supposed to mop up the anger. Even when they are doing good work, they are supposed to maintain the status quo. They are the missionaries of the corporate world.”
-Arundhati Roy
We had achieved independence about fifty years ago. In spite of being a liberal country, Bangladesh could not effort proper facilities that ought to be served to his countryman. Our motherland got exhausted with acute hunger, poverty, unemployment, child disease, and many other survival problems. In these unavoidable circumstances, we were in great need of foreign donations. As soon as the foreign donation reaches then NGOs came up with a great mission to provide relief to the people affected by the war of independence by helping to rebuild their livelihoods. In the last few decades, NGOs in Bangladesh have traveled a long way: reaching the remote areas, mobilizing the poor into groups for making them aware of health, education, running schools, providing loans to start their small businesses. With the improvements in Bangladesh’s social indicators and its economic condition, the fortunes of the NGOs have also changed.
According to the degree of autonomy, location, and scope of activities NGOs can be divided into various categories. With regard to, NGOs can be categorized as welfare NGOs, development NGOs, service NGOs, environmental NGOs, advocacy NGOs, human rights NGOs, women’s NGOs, and religious NGOs.
Examples of one large development NGO of Bangladesh that becomes globally known for their success stories, include the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee and Gonosastya Kendra (People’s Health Center). Another outstanding example of this worldwide expansion of the Bangladeshi experience is the Grameen Bank which has been replicated in Certain Arian, Africa, Latin American,n and European countries in terms of objective, structure, and process of delivering microcredit to the poor. The number of registered NGOs in our country is nearly 23000. Among those, some well-known development NGOs include Proshika Manobik Unnayan Kendra, Association for social advancement, Swanivar Bangladesh, Nijera Kori, Asha, and so on.
If we want to have a look at NGOs' focus points and activities then it will come through our mind about some NGOs especially working for the purpose of women precisely to be said about relief and rehabilitation activities and establishing small business through providing micro-credit facilities. In most cases, however, the gender sensitivity of the organization was limited only to the selection of women as beneficiaries. The organizations did not seem aware that a significant proportion of the funds may nonetheless be appropriated by male family members, as has sometimes been the case, and thereby might have the potential of encouraging male domination over women.
Particulars areas of attention are-
Beneficiary selection criteria implemented by activist women’s groups where priority was given to women heads-of-households, widows, and women who are abandoned or otherwise in distress.
Women-friendly working environments during the construction of flood shelters and other cash-for-work programs including toilet facilities, drinking water, child care facilities, and recruitment of elderly/disabled/pregnant women to look after the facilities.
Women trained as para-veterinarians to vaccinate and inoculate livestock.
Women trained as mechanics for the repair of tube wells and as skilled hands in the manufacture of sanitary slabs and rings.
Inclusion of sanitary napkins among relief materials.
Certain rules and regulations that are obtained from the pre-independence period are still used by the post-independence regimes to regulate or control NGOs. For example, from the period of Pakistani rule, Bangladesh has inherited the Voluntary Social Welfare Agencies Ordinance of 1961, which still allows the government (especially its department of social welfare) to authorize or suspend NGOs. In the post-independent period, the BNP government introduced the Foreign Donations (Voluntary Activities) Regulation Ordinance in 1978, which was amended in 1982 under the Ershad regime. This ordinance enables the government to control the flow of funds from foreign donors to NGOs and requires all NGOs to have prior government approval to receive foreign contributions. The most important fact that has to be mentioned that Large structural NGOs such as Proshikha, BRAC, Grameen Bank for their funding now are not dependent on foreign donation or other interests, quite enough to support themselves.
The government also has institutional means to exercise control over NGOs, including the NGO Affairs Bureau( NGOAB) created in 1990, and the Association of Development Agencies in Bangladesh (ADAB) established in 1974. On behalf of the government, the NGOAB maintains control over NGOs through the assessment, approving, monitoring, and inspecting incomes and expenditures and the overall performance of NGOs. On the other hand, the ADAB functions as the coordinating umbrella organization of which all major NGOs are members. The most crucial task of the ADAB is to coordinate and facilitate the relationship and interaction among NGOs, between the NGOs and the government, between the NGOs and the donors, and between the NGOs and the other civil-society groups.
However, for providing massive micro-credit services disunity among people arises through receivers and non-receivers of credit. Because of prevailing multi-functional NGOs massively in numbers leads the receivers of micro-credit to a collapsed unity as well as changing the formation of any strong bonding society of rural poor people. Thus, we came up with a motive about NGOs disempowering rural people rather than empowering themselves.
This year the world is going through a crisis situation that is the recent outbreak of COVID-19. In this situation, the government of Bangladesh took several measures to cope with the outbreak. Firstly, like in most other places lockdown was announced and it was found quite difficult to enforce. It became very difficult to convince the people to follow the rules of lockdown as well as to maintain social distance. In addition to lack of awareness, poor people found very little difference between starvation and death from the virus. Secondly, testing took a long time to be available and the state-run facilities struggled to provide reliable and accessible services. One Bangladeshi NGO (Gonosasthya Kendra) developed a testing machine and claimed it is cheap and reliable.
In this backdrop, NGOs had called upon the government to engage them in tackling the crisis caused by the outbreak of coronavirus, which is having far-reaching impacts on health and the economy, especially on the poor and vulnerable communities across the country.
The above analysis of the Bangladesh case demonstrates that the increased power of NGOs also has critical implications. In this case, some remedial alternatives are suggested below:
It is necessary to re-evaluate the current rhetoric that usually overemphasizes the contribution of NGOs to society while overlooking the vested interest behind the “Big business” of NGOs.
Adequate control over the external linkages of NGOs, it has become crucial to adopt effective internal regulations in order to manage the excessive proliferation of NGOs, scrutinizing their revenues and expenditures, assess their human resource practices, prevent them from ignoring original agenda and ensure their accountability to the public.
NGOs should be made more sustainable through the provision of endowments and other long-term financial agreements.
Donors should continue their advocacy role with the government on behalf of NGOs but also become advocates for other legitimate actors in civil society.
Donors should diversify their grant portfolio and provide support for apex organization across all of civil society.
Sumaya Tasnim
Session 14-15
Department of Management
