white people know what’s best for poor people*

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s easy to cover up the dismal reality of a situation with a slur of fancy rhetoric (a few charts also don’t hurt). As the wealthy west continues to help save poor African children (as if we were the only ones that could save them), let us tread very carefully.

These excerpts below from the book, Planet of the Slums, by Mike Davis, criticize NGOs, which have been recently heralded as the hope for developing nations, since it has been very clear that various government policies have failed. However, the real picture is not quite so rosy.

What Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in his brief tenure as chief economist for the Bank described as an emerging “post-Washington Consensus” might be better characterized as “soft imperialism,” with the major NGOs captive to the agenda of the international donors, and grassroots groups similarly dependent upon the international NGOs.

For all the glowing rhetoric about democratization, self-help, social capital, and the strengthening of civil society, the actual power relations in this new NGO universe resemble nothing so much as traditional clientelism.

…development economist Diana Mitlin, writing about Latin America, describes how, on one hand, NGOs “preempt community-level capacity- building as they take over decision-making and negotiating roles,” while, on the other hand, they are constrained by “the difficulties of managing donor finance, with its emphasis on shortterm project funds, on financial accountabilities and on tangible outputs…

… Lea Jellinek, a social historian who has spent more than a quarter-century studying the poor in Jakarta, in turn, recounts how one famed NGO, a neighborhood microbank, “beginning as a small grassroots project driven by needs and capacities of local women,” grew Frankenstein-like into a “large, complex, top-down, technically oriented bureaucracy,” that was “less accountable to and supportive of” its low-income base…

… Veteran Mumbai housing activist P.K. Das offers an even harsher critique of slum-oriented NGOs:

Their constant effort is to subvert, dis-inform and de-idealize people so as to keep them away from class struggles. They adopt and propagate the practice of begging favours on sympathetic and humane grounds rather than making the oppressed conscious of their rights. As a matter of factor, these agencies and organizations systematically intervene to oppose to agitational path people take to win their demands. Their effort is constantly to divert people’s attention from the larger political evils of imperialism to merely local issues and so confuse people in differentiating enemies from friends.

The unfortunate thing about nonprofit organizations as they grow, become more sustainable and access more resources(things that logically should allow them to accomplish more good), is that they risk alienating themselves from the community they were striving to help in the first place and end up getting caught in a tangle of funding streams, reports and board meetings.

As we professionalize “community organization” and “grassroots”**, do we give the impression to the people we are trying to help, that they aren’t really capable of anything?

* Implicit assumptions: poor people are not white; That title is also taken from an entry on the blog Stuff White People Like.
** I previously posted a series of entries on this topic of "professionalizing care": 1, 2, 3, 4