I thought it was about time for a little update on the work front, for those of you able to keep up with the fast paced development super star that I am.
If only, oh if only. I have now been on a total of 2 x 3 hour field visits. Had 3 x 15 minute meetings with my boss, and achieved absolutely nothing else. Things are becoming a bit desperate. I also seem to be having rather a bad run at Solitaire, you would think after 6 weeks of determined play I’d be getting better. But no. I sincerely hope this is not a sign of things to come.
I’m starting to get a bit more of a picture of my organisation, Bangladesh and development, and I’m becoming ever so slightly disheartened. A few facts:
- Bangladesh is only about 30 years old, the country came into being in the 1970’s after a bitter liberation war fought against Pakistan, millions were killed, and many more raped.
- Bangladesh is one of the most corrupt countries in the world
- Bangladesh has one of the highest numbers of NGO’s and international NGO’s operating in any country.
Combine these three elements together, and you have, basically, a development disaster waiting to happen.
Lets take the corruption point and illustrate how this affects my organisation:
In Bangladesh HIV/AIDS infection rates are relatively low compared with other countries in the region, particularly India. However, statistics are unreliable for a number of reasons, particularly because, with HIV infection rates such an emotive issue, particularly considering that sex before marriage is illegal in this country, the government likes to hugely underestimate the figures. It is widely acknowledged that, in terms of HIV infection, Bangladesh is a bit of a time bomb waiting to happen. Mass migration to the cities; an uneducated illiterate rural population; risky sexual behaviour amongst commercial sex workers and the general population; risky injecting practices amongst IV drug users and a climate in which women are not empowered to negotiate condom use with their partners means that infection rates could rise rapidly and quickly. A number of NGO’s work with ‘at risk groups’ like commercial sex workers to encourage condom use: large numbers of married clients have unprotected sex with multiple sex workers, other partners, and their wives, meaning that the disease will spread rapidly and to a potentially large demographic if the client is infected. There are 13 designated brothel areas in Bangladesh, the largest with over 3,000 sex workers registered to work, and many NGO’s have focused their HIV/AIDS prevention programmes in these places. A lot of work is done through peer-educators, former sex workers who continue to live in the Brothels and who are paid a small stipend (about 30 pounds per month) so that they have time to distribute condoms, liaise with madams and pimps, and run workshops for the residents, without needing to take on clients. From what I have read and heard, the programs are really quite affective, reaching a large number of women and clients in a sensitive way. However, funding is a hugely complicated issue in Bangladesh, and corruption is a major problem. At the moment, 3 very large, well-known and ‘well respected’ international aid agencies are funding the HIV/AIDS programs in Bangladesh. However, for reasons unknown to mere-mortals like me, the funding is dispensed through government. And hear lies the problem. The brothel based intervention programme run by my organisation has had no funding for months and months. No one in the head office team has been paid. I found out last week that one of the programme officers committed suicide recently because he got so desperate, he could not find another job and it just became impossible to feed his family. Field offices are closing all over the place, landlords have not been paid rent, condoms are not being distributed and peer-educators have had to return to sex work as the 30 pound stipend cannot be paid. Apparently this is not a new story in Bangladesh, projects are constantly collapsing because funding is not getting through. It’s perhaps best not to use the internet to speculate on what has happened to this money, but I’m sure you can use your imaginations. Aside from the obvious issue of corruption, it’s also important to remember that, politically speaking, Bangladesh is still a country in it’s infancy. The ruling party has been in power for under a year, and before that there were years of caretaker governments, military rule and of course a bloody liberation struggle that tore the country apart. I suppose it’s unrealistic to expect the wheels of bureaucracy to turn efficiently at this point in the countries history.
Eventually some of the money will make it into the bank accounts of local NGO’s, and the whole programme will start up again from scratch. New staff will be hired, new peer-educators trained, new offices found. What a waste. What a terrible awful waste. But such is the development cycle in Bangladesh, around and around the work will go. Teams of dedicated people, hard work and commitment circulate round and round, from one funding crisis to the next, and the most vulnerable are left to their fate for the days, weeks, months, years it takes for the money to slowly filter through. It’s hard to talk about progress when faced with a reality like that.
Lets look at the third point: the volume of NGO’s and INGO’s in Bangladesh. As with much of the world, Development in Bangladesh has become big business. A job with an international NGO is the most coveted job in the country, closely followed by a national NGO, like the one I work for. NGO jobs mean better pay and better working conditions than any other sector in the country. There are so many NGO’s here, many of them doing incredible awe-inspiring work. But there is a huge amount of overlap, and as many new NGO’s open each day as they shut down. Some NGO’s have their own ways of generating income, but almost all are reliant, over-reliant, on funding from the big Aid agencies. And, of course, the money comes at a price. There are stringent guidelines imposed, understandably I suppose when you consider the levels of corruption in this country, but the result is that there is very little room left for creativity. Once a project proposal has been submitted and accepted, that’s basically it for the duration of the programme. Staff have very little room for manoeuvre, and are unable to respond to changing circumstances. In addition, there are arbitrary rules imposed from above by people who have very little understanding of the grass-rootes reality in Bangladesh. For example, a government official who has never visited a brothel-based HIV project, has decided to increase proportion of sex-workers to peer-educators from 50 to 200. All the staff at the project level know this is utterly insane, and totally unworkable, but decisions come from on-high and that, I’m afraid, is that.
The other issue I’ve come across, amongst many, with regards to funding is that NGO’s replicated projects left, right and centre in order to secure more funding. An example, two projects with exactly the same remit provide sanitation schemes in local slums, Move around some wording, find a new project name, and you have two donors funding two projects at one organization: that’s 2 managers, 2 administrators, multiple trainers and field officers, business cards, glossy reports etc etc-2 projects which are absolutely the same. Talk about a waste of resources in a resource poor environment. The thing is, its hard to blame the NGO’s, they need the donors to survive-or so they’ve been taught.
The more I come across these little story’s, discover these little tiny micro-examples of the problem with this business that is international development, my thoughts turn to some of the community organisations I visited and worked with in Bolivia. None of them had any funding to speak of, but they also did jaw dropping awe-inspiring work. In Latin America social movements unconnected with big aid agencies, who in fact lobby against organisations such as the IMF and world bank-big funders in Bangladesh, have re-written the rules of development. They truly practice the two buzzwords that are spoken too often and enacted too little: grass roots and sustainable. That they do it without cars and computers, without researchers and trainers and advocacy officers and headed notepaper makes it all the more impressive. Certainly it is harder, in the short term, but it means their work is not at the mercy of decision makers who, at the end of the day, are pushing certain values and ways of living, economic and social systems that support the modes of thinking of the western countries in which these organisations are based.
The organisation I work for runs about 50 projects, but there is a big disparity between projects. There is no pay scale, rather wages are determined by the donors, some projects have new motor-bikes for field visits, new computers and plenty of staff, others are running on pure hard work and little else. Others are not running at all. The problem is, basically, that the organisation doesn’t really exist: rather a collection of projects are housed under one roof, with little dialogue between projects and departments.
And my job is, to work across all departments and a large number of projects to strengthen the capacity of the 4,000 + volunteers engaged by the various projects. Whilst there seems to be an ‘academic’ interest in improving the quality of volunteers training, staff ability to work with, motivate and retain volunteers, and the managements ability to mainstream volunteers voices into the organisation, I’m struggling to see where the resources to achieve all this work will come from-and so is everyone else. Although many projects are well funded, the organization as a whole is not, and what we really need is a team of people working on this, at least a volunteer manager that I develop the programme with, so that when I leave something is left-it makes no sense at all for me to carry out extensive research if there is no one at all to implement the findings, and for me to implement them myself would be more about my own ego than anything else, there’s little point doing anything if it won’t last beyond the time that I am here. And the joke is? A full time volunteer manager would cost about 200 pounds per month.
Its hard not to become disheartened when faced with this reality; I often look around my office and see all these hard working people grinding away, and wonder, what is the fucking point? But then I see a street-child at a drop in centre who’s learnt to read, or a pregnant mother getting a free check up in a slum clinic, and I know its right to carry on. I think its best not to look at what’s above me, at the bigger picture, because the weight of the mess we have created becomes too heavy to bear.
And so I’ll troop off to work tomorrow, and I’ll see children with no arms and old ladies with eyes missing and men so malnourished I can’t look anymore, I have to turn away, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this will be the week that I do something, anything, the tiniest thing that will make some sort of difference to something…
