Do international NGOs cause more problems than they solve?

The need for humanitarian aid is greater than ever as the Ukraine conflict threatens to add millions more people to a record global tally of 274m that the UN has predicted will require urgent help this year. 

But while international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) may play a prominent role in trying to deliver that aid, critics have suggested that “broken” humanitarian systems risk doing more harm than good.

Paul Spiegel, a former senior official at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), argued in a paper published in The Lancet journal in 2017 that the humanitarian system was “no longer fit for purpose”. Spiegel, now director of the Maryland-based Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, told NPR that the “Band-Aid approach” made sense “for a simpler era, where conflicts and wars were shorter in nature and had an end”, but was “not functioning anymore”. 

Historic problems

Concerns about cultural sensitivity and respect for local communities have long been raised about international humanitarian efforts. A 2018 study by researchers from the universities of Reading and Portsmouth found that ensuring INGO workers spoke the language of aid recipients was generally “a low priority in development”. 

In an article on The Conversation, the researchers warned that communication problems could result in local people becoming “confused about the objectives of aid projects”, and threatened “the trust that communities have in NGOs”.

Other critics have argued that humanitarians risk inadvertently extending conflicts in the communities they seek to help. By bringing essential resources to war-torn or disaster-hit communities, NGOs may relieve rival faction of many of the burdens of waging war, and even provide an incentive to continue conflicts.

In an article published in The New Yorker in 2010 under the headline “Alms dealers”, Philip Gourevitch summed up the logic of the humanitarian era as “sowing horror to reap aid, and reaping aid to sow horror”.

Consider, Gourevitch wrote, “how, in the early Eighties, aid fortified fugitive Khmer Rouge killers in the camps on the Thai Cambodian border, enabling them to visit another ten years of war, terror and misery upon Cambodians; and how, in the mid-Nineties, fugitive Rwandan genocidaires were succoured in the same way by international humanitarians in border camps in eastern Congo”.

Mission drift and brain drain

Other problems can arise when a well-intentioned INGO arrives in a community to fulfil a temporary mission, but ends up staying for a long period. 

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/955954/do-international-ngos-cause-more-problems-than-they-solve