Amidst the seemingly inexorable growth of urban destitution, can NGO/state partnerships mobilise marginalised communities to reduce vulnerability? How can urban NGOs become more effective given resource limitations, asks a recent INTRAC study based on a two-year examination of ten NGOs in Ahmedabad.

Efforts by central and state governments, donors and NGOs have not prevented an absolute increase in the number of urban poor in Ahmedabad. The decline of the textile industry has been accompanied by communal violence and religious fundamentalism. Rapid expansion and a declining tax base have made it impossible for the municipality to provide waste, sewerage, healthcare and education services to the city’s 2.8 million people.

NGOs have an unstable mix of funding sources, staff qualifications, legal status and quality of assets. Funding from NGOs, bilateral agencies and indigenous sources is generally project-specific. High rates of staff turnover have contributed to a dearth of second-level leaders. NGO capacity to initiate institutional development and technical assistance is constrained. They have to tread carefully and not be seen to supplement or replace services provided by the state, however meager.

Not all is gloom, however. In parts of the city where NGOs work with community based organisations (CBOs) there are measurable improvements in school attendance levels, literacy, immunization, and mortality rates. Most Ahmedabad NGOs have successfully facilitated the development of community based organisation.

Among the main findings are:

• NGO partnerships promoted by external agencies like the World Bank and USAID have proven unsustainable.
• Efforts to privatise services have overestimated the ability of the poor to pay.
• NGOS suffer organisational inertia as founder-directors are unwilling to share experience and consider novel approaches.
• NGOs tend to divide slum areas between themselves, creating the danger that geographically focused NGOs will develop intra-communal dependencies.
• NGOs tend to form new CBOs rather than work with existing ones.

Guidelines for a more effective NGO sector include:

• NGOs must cooperate (and stop wasting resources in competition for funding) if a citywide assault on poverty is to be launched.
• The NGO sector must shift from provision of goods and services to a more facilitatory role focusing on enhancing capacity of the local community.
• Secondment of staff within partner NGOs would break down barriers to learning.
• Outdated categories which have polarised development actors as heroes or villains needs to be jettisoned if local government, CBOs, the private sector and NGOs are to develop closer working partnerships.
• NGO-local government partnerships will fail if they ignore the role of elected politicians.

Source(s):
‘Finding a pathway: Understanding the work and performance of NGOs in Ahmedabad, India’ by Shrawan Acharya and Leo Thomas, INTRAC Occasional Papers Series #22, March 1999

Funded by: DGIS, Holland

id21 Research Highlight: 1 May 2001

Further Information:
Carolyn Blaxall
INTRAC
PO Box 563
Oxford OX2 6RZ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1865 201851
Fax: +44 (0)1865 201852
Contact the contributor: c.blaxall@intrac.org

INTRAC, UK

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