We’re In Business

Despite the rhetoric and philanthropic characterization of international development, the development industry is just like any other. While they may never admit it, every NGO, donor and government program is a business in the business of staying in business.

And like every other business, development organizations need a steady inflow of money to remain operational. Competition for this income amongst development ‘businesses’ is just as fierce as the battle for customers between warring fast food giants. However, for development, this money doesn’t come from customers but rather is supplied by donors – those good people, companies and agencies dedicated to distributing the world’s foreign aid.

But here is where we find a problem. You see, in a normal business, companies will do whatever it takes to better serve their customers because it will improve their profits.  But in development, the customers (i.e. intended beneficiaries) don’t supply the organization’s income so there are no pecuniary incentives to serve them better.

Projects habitually do a better job of serving donors than their intended beneficiaries. I don’t suggest that development is bad because it has capitalist values but I do think it is important to recognize when those profit-driven values are hindering the industry’s ability to help its intended beneficiaries.

As a means of illustrating my point, let me describe a meeting I had just a few weeks ago with another NGO (which I still like and respect and so have omitted their name) who was hired by the same agricultural project (the Project) as Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB).

The NGO had already been working for the Project for two years before EWB came on the scene.  However, EWB had done some cutting-edge work on value-chains and farmer group development and could bring innovation and fresh ideas.

Seeing a perfect opportunity for collaboration I set up a meeting to talk about the work the NGO had already done, what they were hoping to achieve, and the potential for us to work together to make sure our organizations were learning as much as possible from each other’s strengths and past mistakes.

During the otherwise amicable meeting, the NGO politely and diplomatically declined the request for information because:

• They had been involved in the Project for many years so they didn’t need anyone else’s ideas;
• They were competitors with EWB because EWB was awarded responsibility for a large portion of the project that should have been theirs; and
• If they were going to collaborate with EWB, they would need a very clear Terms of Reference formulated to spell out the responsibilities of each organization in the collaboration.

I was a bit confused and told them, honestly, I just wanted to learn more about the NGO’s work to see where I should start from; I really had no interest in competing with them.  I believed by sharing our respective strengths we could make sure both organizations did the best possible job at improving the livelihood of the small-holder farmers the Project was targeting to support.

The NGO employees were quick to point out they were not against collaboration, they just required formality around their contributions and this is when it became clear what the problem was.  You see, the NGO wanted to make the collaboration with EWB formal and documented so that it could obtain funding from the Project for the “support” it would give to EWB.

Really, it was doomed from the start.  A formal Terms of Reference for collaboration would take months to finalize and I wasn’t prepared to sit idle and wait that long to start my work. Besides, how could I concede to such a time-intensive process that would take away from the honest efforts of both our organizations to actually help the small-holder farmers we were targeting?

Overall, the situation was incredibly disappointing. Not specifically because of the NGO’s reaction but with the system of development that makes something easy and sensible, such as teamwork and friendly cooperation, logistically impossible.

Ultimately, what this experience has shown me is the majority of development workers genuinely want to help improve peoples’ livelihoods but they also work within this industry and so face the two conflicting motivations of wanting to help people while, at the same time, wanting to keep money coming into their organization to keep themselves in a job. So now it’s up to us to switch the trend of giving precedence to the latter over the former. Let’s take a lesson from the private sector and put our customers first!

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