Article IV. NGOs will minimize the NGO management burden for ministries.
NGOs recognize the burden on governments that have insufficient resources to organize their own country’s affairs, while having to juggle the management burden of multiple and sometimes-competing aid organizations from a variety of other countries.
- In recognition of donor commitments at the 2005 Paris High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness and sector-wide approaches to planning, evaluation and coordination, NGOs commit to meaningful joint planning within the ministries’ own planning cycles.
- NGOs pledge to respect government and health ministry priorities, as well as labor and personnel policies. These policies include those relating to programmatic and geographic deployment of health resources, especially those that foster wider distribution of health workers and promote access to services.
- NGOs recognize that management capacity in Ministries of Health is often limited. Rather than building parallel or circuitous structures around inadequate capacity, NGOs commit to strengthening governments’ ability to operate effectively and efficiently. This practice may lead to NGOs seconding personnel to direct government service.
International NGOs mainly enter the country with the attitude of developing parallal programs designed with the state of the art strategies and tools which in many cases do not produce the desired effect on the beneficiaries. The Government is un-aware of INGOs programs and where abouts in the country, there is no sharing happening and things like scaling up and giving the ownership are far away from reality.
Imagine if an NGO from get go involves the concerned govt officials at every step, make them feel important in a natural way and share program goals, objectives and innovations that are shaping up where the govt’s input is to the fullest, such programs are invariably successful and scalable. It is a simple equation but it was never easy to accept because of ngo/donor perception towards governments etc
We have wasted decades of work that went into these needy countries because we as ngos felt all this time that we have the resources, we are better-off technically and we do quality work and we feel our external assistance is making a differance to the lives of our beneficiaries.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:32 amAn NGO work can become very effective if it works with the Govt whole heartedly given the resources that it has.
Today many donors including USAID are designing strategies which are leaning heavily on the Govt/ministries in the fore front, but in true terms it is not happening, there is still lot of resistance and stuborness shown at the implementation level by the ngos/donors. This has to go away from heart of hearts from donors/ implementers in order to achieve good results for the work that goes into these programs.
Bangladesh is a good example where it has the max number of ngos working for ages with no benefit what so ever, for such a small country with the kind of external relief that it receives in the form of humanitarian assistance, the country should have no health problems today. Bangladesh continues to suffer even more today making it more dependable…. humanitarian assistance has become a bussiness and on top of it is a failure.
This scenario will only change if all aid agencies develops the attitude that we are all the world citizens with no borders and we help one another with love and dignity.