Once upon a time, a long time ago in the western world, people thought that development work was a good thing. Triggered by dramatised commercials on tv, showing African children covered with flies and dying from hunger, people felt that poverty is terrible and something should be done about it. Luckily, there were development organisations that tried to fight the extreme poverty in the rest of the world. They were building schools and digging wells and the public respected these organisations for doing so. They were even willing to donate some of their hard-earned money to them once in while. Nobody questioned these organisations; they believed their intentions were good, and that was enough…
Well, these days are far behind us.
Looking at the Netherlands, the time that development work was completely uncontested must be more than twenty years ago. Especially in the past decade, criticism on development work has greatly increased. Politicians stating that the Netherlands should decrease the amount of budget for development issues (or even to completely stop funding it) have gained popularity. More and more people regard development work as a bottomless pit and a “left-wing hobby.” They are supported by influential scholars like Dambisa Moyo and Easterly, who claim that development work keeps the poor poor.
I started working for a development organisation only two years ago, which means that I have never actually experienced how it is to work in this sector without being heavily criticised. I have become used to the fact that on every birthday party I attend, there are always some people that have the urge to “confront me” with their “own” opinion on development and poverty (usually after a couple of beers..). These visions usually contain the following basic elements: the first is that development work is completely ineffective (“Africa was poor and still is poor, so what have you achieved?”). The second is that too much of the money for development work is spend on overhead costs (“I will not fund any development organisation, because then your salary will be paid with my money”).
You can imagine that those birthday parties are always a lot of fun…
Most of my colleagues started their career somewhere in the seventies and eighties, in a period when development work was completely uncontested. Imagine their reaction when suddenly the public opinon turned against them. Not being used to this heavy criticism, development organisations panicked. If the public thought that development work was not effective, the organisations had to show them the opposite. They had to show the public their results. Consultants were hired to assist them in setting up result-based management systems,sums of money were spent on evaluations. And a whole bunch of people were calculating all the trainings that had been given, wells that were dug and people that were reached, and still the public was complaining that NGOs were not effective…
For consultants this was a booming period. Let me be clear about this: most consultants are mere salesmen, with the single difference that they do not sell products, but concepts. A salesman knows that a product doesn’t have to be new or useful, you just have to convince people that it is new (“innovative”) and useful (“necessary for achieving your objectives”). The best client is an insecure client, and NGOs were insecure. Consultants had so much work, they couldn’t handle it anymore. This was the moment that consultants changed from being mere salesmen to being gurus. All NGOs wanted to hire them and nobody questioned their ideas any more. The consultants became the holy men of the development sector.
In spite of all the money spent in the past years in an effort to show results, the public still does not believe that development work is effective. And, again, NGO’s are going to respond to this by investing more in their M&E systems and hiring more consultants. The irony is that, in order to show results to their public, overhead costs of NGOs are actually rising and rising. And the public has something to complain about again…
The NGOs are in a treadmill, and it is time to help them out.