By Arthur Baguma
In 1995, a local Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) closed business after operating for 10 years in Rakai district. It turned out that the cost of remuneration for expatriates who had run it until eight months earlier was almost half the organisation's annual budget.
They had lived in a fairly large complex and the programme director had rented a house in Kampala where he spent most of his time. When the expatriates left, local staff who replaced them expected the same level of pay and to live the same lifestyle. In eight months they ran down the NGO.
Arthur Larok, the director of programmes at Uganda National NGO Forum, says many NGOs in Africa follow a similar pattern, spending almost half of their budget on administration. This limits their impact.
Larok suggests that NGOs should spend 15% of their total budget on administration, but some use as much as 60%. This problem also extends to government projects funded by donors, he notes.
NGOs have played a large role in the social and economic lives of developing countries, including Uganda. While many provide valuable services, the sector has grown much faster than elected officials can monitor. This has created opportunities for scam artists who are eager to enrich themselves than to serve the public.
Also, some political officials voice frustrations that NGOs at times operate on a different set of rules and pursue different priorities than local leaders think appropriate. And lately, some NGOs have attracted complaints that they promote dependence instead of self-sufficiency in communities where they operate, with the result that some areas have failed to develop even after NGOs have been "helping" them for decades.
A team from The New Vision has been exploring these and related questions. What is the contribution of NGOs to national development and job creation? Is the mushrooming of NGOs in Africa a sign that states have failed to do their work, or is it a sign of development?
The only official statistics on the value of NGOs to national development are 10 years old. They paint a gloomy picture of the sector. A study conducted in 1998 indicates that only 20% of registered NGOs are usually active on the ground. No comprehensive study has been done since then to quantify the contribution of NGOs.
Statistics about the evolution of NGOs in Uganda also are sketchy. The 1960s and 1970s produced no documented data on NGOs. However, a sketchy picture started to emerge in 1986, when the National NGO Forum was established. At the time, the forum's statistics showed there were about 200 registered NGOs. Within 10 years, the number had skyrocketed to 3,000. By the end of 2007, the number of registered NGOs were 7,000 in Uganda.
Few of them are operational. A survey done in 2003 by the Office of the Prime Minister established that about only 20% of NGOs that get registered go into operation.
"There is a high infant mortality rate in the NGO sector. We have an NGO sector that is smaller on the ground than what is on paper. There is rapid growth in registration, but less in operations," Larok explains. Still, NGOs play a large role.
It is estimated that NGOs and faith-based organisations have been contributing around 40% of services. Those that are operational create public awareness of various issues, contribute to policy-making and monitoring and build capacity in a variety of sectors. They create employment and pay significant amounts in import duties, pay as you earn and value added tax, among other taxes, contributing to the growth of the economy.
A number of attempts have been made to document the contribution of NGOs to development. Civil society in Uganda in 1998 alone accounted for about $89m (about sh187b) in expenditures, an amount equivalent to 1.4% of GDP at the time.
The sector employed more than 230,000 workers, representing 2.3% of the country's economically active population and 10.9% of its non-agricultural employment. The civil society workforce was estimated to be one-and-a-half times as large as the public sector workforce and more than half as large as the workforce in all fields of manufacturing combined.
The lack of good data on NGOs soon may change. The NGO Forum, in conjunction with the Government, is about to conduct a national study covering as many districts and examining the work of NGOs in the last 10 years. This will be a comprehensive study on the value and contribution of NGOs to good governance and the socio-economic development of Uganda.
Regulation of NGOs
NGOs are regulated under the 1989 NGO statute, which was amended in 2006 to become the NGO Act. But the NGO Board, the Government arm responsible for regulation of NGOs, is incapacitated. "They don't have staff," says an NGO official. "When you get there, it is a tea girl who will welcome you."
He says in the 1990's an international NGO offered to overhaul the body and offer it computers, but the Government rejected the gesture. The NGO Forum is not represented on the board. The board consists of representatives from the education ministry, Office of Prime Minister, local governments and two representatives of the public, appointed by the minister and representatives from the Internal Security Organisation and external security Organisation.
NGOs themselves are not represented. "Our concern has always been why we are denied representation on the NGO board yet we are the major stakeholders," says the NGO Forum.
Why the Rapid growth of NGOs?
Scholars say the NGO sector tends to grow rapidly in countries that are recovering from war. James Kinobe, a PhD scholar at Makerere University, explains that when NRM came to power, it inherited a collapsed economy and a government with no structures. They did not have the capacity and resources to offer services at the time.
Consequently NGOs were given a green light to supplement government efforts. "NGOs played a key role in the recovery process of the country," Kinobe observes. The restoration of the rule of law and constitutionalism may also have contributed to the mushrooming of NGOs.
"Policy making was liberalised and made more participatory. This also constituted an enabling environment for NGOs to flourish and participate in policy making," Larok observes.
Early evolution of NGOs
The NRM's support for NGOs represents the culmination of a long history. In the early days of colonialism, the framework that various African communities used for self-governance and the provision of basic-needs was either destroyed or subordinated to colonial structures.
This was the case among various African communities until the colonial authorities authorised the construction of various facilities intended to supplement the efforts of the 'natives' in service provision. Throughout Africa, missionary organisations established institutions to provide services designed to meet basic needs services, especially healthcare and education.
The mission centres also became the only places other than urban and the European settled areas where clean drinking water could be found for the better part of the colonial period. The Protestant and Catholic missionary orders played a major role providing humanitarian assistance in the form of clothing, foodstuffs, and healthcare, especially for orphans and the destitute, who could not get assistance from the existing kinship networks.
In performing these services, missionary organisations would emerge as the most important non-governmental actors during the colonial period. "Prior to independence, in most African countries, the most prominent NGOs emanated from European settler society, missionary activity and grassroot society organisations, whose major concerns were welfare and religious activities," Kinobe says. The situation would, however, change after independence.
Post-independence period
In most African countries, a spate of new NGOs was formed around the time of independence. These organisations continued to grow in the post-colonial period. Since the 1980s, NGOs have mushroomed, doubling and tripling their numbers in many countries.
Social analysts cite the failure of government on the political and economic level as a major reason for the proliferation of NGOs. The growing stature of NGOs in development is related to the decline of the state as the dominant development actor in Africa.
There has been a shift since the 1970s in the attitudes of the donors and development policy-makers, away from the state-centered development models towards more participatory bottom-up approaches. As a result, the role of NGOs in the development of third world nations has grown rapidly. But the question is: Is the NGO sector sufficiently supervised to ensure that it is meeting the needs of Ugandans?
