Beneficiaries are actors too.pdf - Southern Institute of Peace ...

conflict ridden African states, where 'civic values' cannot be taken
for granted among NGO employees and where competition for
association with western partners and access to hard currency is
stiff, leading to a harsh struggle for survival by any given
organisation. This has led local NGOs and INGOs to be over
dramatic and to sensationalise conflict situations in their reports,
doing so in ways that are partial and which would suit view points
of their funders in order to please their western sponsors and to
enable them to secure more funding.
Another factor conditioning the development of the NGO
community is the widespread lack of resources. These can be
human in nature as well as material and financial. This has led to
a search for outside training, equipment and funding. Such a
search has a variety of consequences. On the one hand, it can
introduce a potentially positive element of competition into the
emerging NGO realm, forcing organisations to attempt to generate
high-quality proposals. However, all too often this initial phase
encourages a certain amount of parroting of supposed western
civic values in order to obtain grant monies, rather than to the
actual internalisation of such values by locals, which is a slow
process depending inter alia on conditions outside the NGO
community. Thus, an overly rapid and uncritical adoption of
western funding organizations' agendas takes place, with little
sense of the need and/or available capacity to reflect on
significant differences between western and African societies and
to modify approaches accordingly. This has affected the
impartiality of NGOs involved in conflicts in Africa and reduced
the trust warring factions would have in them, thus diminishing
their role in conflict resolution and peace building.
Puplampu and Tettey (2000) argue that the increasing
globalisation forces are conditioning the state and NGOs. The
heightened competition between the state and NGOs for
resources, make it so that INGOs are increasingly being
substituted for good local policies (Puplampu & Tettey, 2000).
Local governments are opting out of performing a lot of the
necessary and basic services because their incentives to provide
them are being eroded by the presence of foreign NGOs with
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