Tag Archives: NGO sector

How For-Profit Businesses Can Reduce Corruption in Development Aid

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Although for-profit businesses often are epicenters of corruption-related problems, there are opportunities for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to reduce corruption in development aid—particularly in locales and sectors where NGOs and the government do not seem to have an impact, or where the NGOs and governments are themselves part of the problem. Development practitioners and policymakers should consider greater use of for-profit businesses, as opposed to non-profit NGOs, for implementing development projects.

There are several reasons why SMEs may be able to successfully run for-profit social ventures that are potentially more resistant to corruption: Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Long, Long Road from Talking Transparency to Curbing Corruption in Mauritania

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Till Bruckner, an international development expert who recently spent six months living Mauritania, and contributes the following guest post based on his experience there:

What do fish and iron have in common? Answer: Mauritania, a largely desert country of less than four million people in north-western Africa, is immensely rich in both. At the same time, most Mauritanians are poor. And one of the biggest reasons is corruption and misgovernance.

Consider first fishing. Although Mauritania has some of the world’s richest fishing grounds, its marine wealth is carried away by foreign ships whose owners often bribe senior government figures to obtain fishing permits and take their catch straight to Europe or Asia. As a result, the country has failed to develop a significant fishing industry, or domestic fish processing industry, of its own, and a fishing industry that boasts an annual catch of half a million tons generates a mere 40,000 jobs inside Mauritania. Yet to the south, Senegal translates a catch of similar size into at least 130,000 jobs, while to the north, Morocco has turned its million-ton-a-year catch into a massive export industry whose turnover is projected to reach two billion dollars by the end of this decade.

Inland, deep in the Sahara, some mountains contain more metal than rock, consisting of up to 75% iron, one of the highest concentrations in the world. Mauritania nationalized its iron mines in 1974, creating the state-owned monopoly company SNIM. Its workers blast the slopes to rubble, and conveyor belts transport the rubble into waiting railway waggons. The longest train in the world then chugs its way across 700 kilometres of desert, loads its cargo onto giant foreign freighters—and neither the ore nor most of the money paid for it are ever seen again. The looting dynamics in Mauritania’s mining sector are illustrated by the stark contrast between Zouerate, the town in the Sahara where the iron is mined—which looks like a dystopian hellhole straight out of a Mad Max film—and the rich suburbs of the capital city of Nouakchott (which produces virtually nothing), where giant villas rise out of the sand, and oversized SUVs cruise the streets. And in Nouakchott itself, in the poor suburbs, families living five to a windowless room have to pay for their drinking water by the barrel.

The preferred prescription in a situation like this (from the usual suspects: development professionals, anticorruption activists, etc.) is a combination of transparency, accountability, and civil society monitoring. But Mauritania is actually doing well on those dimensions. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Corruption Among Development NGOs, Part 3–The Need for Collective Action by Funding Agencies

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Roger Henke, Chairman of the Board of the Southeast Asia Development Program (SADP), a development grantmaker based in Cambodia, contributes the following guest post (the third in a three-part series):

Previous posts on development NGO corruption described a survey tool and its results in Cambodia and the conundrum of using the upward accountability relationship between local NGOs (LNGOs) and the grantmakers funding them for remedial action. The analysis of the report which underlies much of those contributions includes another foundational premise: Given the systemic functioning of Cambodia’s (and other countries’) LNGO sectors, anticorruption action to hold these LNGOs to account needs to be collective in order to be effective.

The characterization of the sector as “systemic” is meant to capture fact that nearly all LNGOs are funded by more than one, often five or more, grantmakers, while these grantmakers in turn, each fund many (sometimes more than 25) LNGO partners. To see why this matters for upward accountability, suppose for the moment that a given Grantmaker X takes seriously its responsibilities to diligently oversee LNGO Partner Y, and suppose further that Grantmaker X uncovers a problem. What happens next? The best case scenario is that the LNGO acknowledges the problem and fixes it, while the worst-case scenario is that both the LNGO and the grantmaker ignore the problem. Both of those happen sometimes. But the more common outcome is this: The LNGO fails to deal with the problem, and eventually Grantmaker X decides to stop funding it. But this affects LNGO Y only temporarily, because it has (or can find) other funders, many of which may not exercise the same degree of diligence as Grantmaker X. So nothing much changes. Even when Grantmaker X communicates with other co-funders about the problems, and more of them decide to question their support of LNGO Y, it takes a fair level of coordinated grantmaker disinvestment to put an LNGO out of business. That level of coordination is rare even in cases of obvious crisis, and absent during more mundane times.

What is needed, then, is more collective action. Many grantmaker staffs would agree with this in principle, but the dominant response is generally not action but resignation, dressed up as “realism”: “Why waste time on beating a dead horse? Even if local grantmaker offices were all willing to collaborate, aligning the diverse requirements regarding reporting, auditing, etc. of all the headquarters….forget it.” I reject this defeatism. One rarely knows that something won’t work until one tries, and my experience in Cambodia is that practical pilots are very rare. So, what would proper collective diligence regarding financial management imply in practice? Continue reading →

Guest Post: Corruption Among Development NGOs, Part 2–The Hot Potato of Upward Accountability

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Roger Henke, Chairman of the Board of the Southeast Asia Development Program (SADP), a development grantmaker based in Cambodia, contributes the following guest post (the second in a three-part series):

My previous post in this series described the results of a survey that estimated the incidence of fraud and associated problems within the Cambodian NGO sector. The survey utilized a relatively independent source, the grantmakers that fund local NGOs (LNGOs), and triangulated the results with information supplied by the firms that perform external audits for LNGOs. The basic idea was that grantmakers are likely to have an evidence-based opinion of the quality of their LNGO partners’ financial management, governance, and fraud risk (and fraud incidence). After all, grantmakers assess organizational soundness before awarding a first grant to a potential partner LNGO, periodically monitor the work being funded by that grant, and require extensive, often cumbersomely regular, results and financial reporting, as well as yearly or project-based external audits. To put it simply: Grantmakers conduct regular due diligence (in the broad sense of the term) on LNGOs.

It seems strange that such an obvious source of objective data on NGO corruption and some of its correlates had, to my knowledge, never been considered before. Why not? My guess would be that the strained and ambivalent relationship that the aid community has with concept of so-called upward accountability is to blame. The engagement is strained in at least the following two aspects: Continue reading →