Article V. NGOs will support Ministries of Health as they engage with communities.
NGOs can play an important role as a bridge between civil society organizations and government agencies, especially (but not exclusively) in nations where populations or sub-populations are actively oppressed by their governments.
- NGOs will strengthen the capacity of communities to take responsibility for and ownership of their health development, and to become partners with government in the health system, while holding governments accountable for their human rights obligations.
- NGOs shall document and share their work in and with communities to inform host government planning and priority setting. In sharing this information, NGOs will guard the privacy of individuals with whom they work, including staff and patients.
- In places where NGOs are working with communities that are being oppressed, NGOs will work to protect populations.
While I agree with the general sentiments expressed in this article, I had hoped- as the title suggests-” Support Ministries of Health”- that the focus here would have been on addressing some of the key burdens that NGO’s typically place on Ministries. Rather than working to complement MoH, by engaging communities and promoting accountability- as NGO’s, we’ve typically taken on roles of the MoH, thus creating redundacy as opposed to building the capacity of health systems to effectively deliver services. As a result in many settings, it’s not quite clear what the NGOs and the Ministries are responsible for. In an effort to produce “quick results”as has been stipulated earlier- NGOs take on government functions for a limited period of time to meet their own goals and purposes. This of course ultimately undermines the existing structures and creates a vicious cycle of the problems we intended to solve.
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:14 pmInternational 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 11:46 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.