Photograph: Valery Sharifulin/TASS
We used to call it ‘going to the dark side’. After years of struggling valiantly with local corruption, no resources and always praying to the almighty ‘donor Gods’, every NGO worker has had the thought: “working for the United Nations would be so much easier”.
Aid workers know the scenario: sitting around drinking our overpriced cocktails in whatever “global south” country we are in, swapping ever increasingly horrific field stories and try to demonstrate how “legit” we are as humanitarian workers. There’s self-esteem and professional validation in being hard-done by. Humanitarian workers, myself included, always remind me of the Four Yorkshire Men skit from Monty Python. “You had to live in a tent for ten years, with $15 funding a year and convince the local warring tribe that the other US-backed group is simply misunderstood? Luxury!”
We all had friends who worked for the UN, of course. We would listen to their stories about the ineptitude, bureaucracy and money-wasting. We would think “there but by the grace of God go I”. At least in the NGO sector, we work on the ground, we engage with local partners and we put the beneficiaries of programming first.
But is that actually true? I was one of those traitors, those sell-outs. After 10 years working in international development at the local partner level in organisational capacity development, I went over to the ‘dark side’. I started working for the UN.
And through Alice’s Looking Glass, I was faced with a stark truth. Working for the UN has many positives we dismiss as NGO workers. Resourcing, partnership development and the ability to mobilise programming is so much easier within the UN. Yes the UN is at its heart a political beast and it’s frustrating as hell. It’s filled with bottlenecks and cynical, regressive thinking. But in terms of programme development, it doesn’t seem much slower than in the NGO sector.
Through the looking glass, you can see the critiques of the NGO sector more clearly; its ineffectiveness, its blatant corruption, its appalling policy deficit in respect to development best practice and basic safety for its workers and beneficiaries, its constant appeasement of its donors at the cost of its vision, mandate and basic function. Through no fault of its own, the NGO sector has no autonomy. It is always beholden to its donors. And so is the UN.
Despite its reputation, the UN is actually a collection of rather small players in a hardcore realist political game. Like the NGO sector, it functions on extremely limited resources on a tightrope of political and donor appeasement. Do either of us, the NGO sector or the UN, get the job done? The answer is probably no. But this self-declared dichotomy that our goals are somehow divergent from one another serves no one.
The idea that NGOs are the pure, good-hearted bastions of “true” development is pointless. Where is the value of being on a moral high horse when people are starving?
Conversely, the United Nations is a hypocritical and inefficient collection of individuals. But these are individuals who actually, on the whole, seek societal good.
The UN is beholden to a perverse level of politicking by nation states who have anything but the global development of sustainable improvement on their minds. The UN does however have political legitimacy and comparatively better resources for development than the NGO sector. I’ll probably be hung for saying this, but people in the NGO sector are not the martyrs to save civil society and the UN ain’t that bad. But yes, we do an equally bad job at international development. Maybe the solution is innovation?
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