Southeast Asia used to be (and in many ways still is) a playground for some of the largest developmental organizations in the world. The fact that Asian Development Bank has its headquarters in the region, along with multiple offices of UNDP and aspiring smaller NGOs, says much about how modern developmental work has shaped Southeast Asian economies. Indeed, the long presence of aid organizations here have contributed much to how people locally perceive themselves, seeing themselves often as the deservedly unfortunate individuals who should receive the constant developmental support they are receiving.
For the author, meeting many people with careers in "aid-based development" has been the first real, observable exposure to such international field work. And it is unfortunate that the exposure has not been particularly positive. There are many real cases of communities being hurt in the long term by spiraling dependence on aid that has often come as cash handouts without knowledge transfer of how the said communities can become economically sustainable in their own means. When the projects pull out, the communities simply fall back into poverty.
Most of the development professionals seem pretty oblivious to the cycle of dependence that they help create in remote communities, and private sector professionals often waste no time in criticizing NGOs for inefficient expenditure of resources that, private sector believes, can obtain much better returns if invested as businesses rather than given out as developmental aid. The author was even told, by someone in the private sector with NGO experience, that on average, for every $10 that goes into a NGO, only $0.5 makes it to the end client, while the remaining $9.5 is spent on administrative and marketing costs.
Given stories like these, it is easy to be cynical about whether NGOs in developing countries are necessary in the first place. Yes, they tend to distort the local markets by injecting it with huge amounts of financial resources that locals cannot produce on their own, and in the process may even amplify previously small-time cases of corruption into political rivalries that endanger the very political construct of a nation. But at the end of the day, the cynics forget the fact that the comparison is not between the $0.5 used and the $9.5 wasted, but between $0.5 that did end up with the locals vs $0 if NGOs are not present.
Indeed, for all the problems that NGOs purportedly cause in their host countries (of which many are quite real and quite serious), the fact that they are there to make some sort of efforts through trial and error has valuable lessons for humanity. After all, for all the criticisms that the private sector pile upon the NGOs, it is hardly imaginable that the same private sector firms and professionals will launch themselves into these underdeveloped countries as viable substitutes for the NGOs they criticize. Simply said, the lack of basic levels of economic development in these countries means there is little incentive for private firms' entry.
For the author himself, the above limitations of private firms have not been made anymore clearer after working with a startup firm here in Southeast Asia. The firm of course has brought values to the region in that it created a new industry that provide a convenient new service for the growing middle-class population. But simultaneously, it ignores the fact that the region remains deeply hampered by systemic poverty that afflicts a much larger percentage of the overall population, a group that the firm neither has the commercial interest or the capacity to support or assist in anyway.
As such, even for cynics of aid-based development (like the author himself), it is painfully obvious that private firms, by themselves, can only take advantage of good economic conditions created by other actors (most notably governments with favorable policies or investments, and international institutions that monitor them), but cannot become the condition-creators themselves. This is what truly distinguishes the NGOs and other public sector entities from profit-seeking companies, however innovative and motivated these companies may be.
And by experiencing both the private sector side and a NGO environment, one can gain a much fuller picture of how global economic development really works. The process of how a society transforms from an impoverished to a dynamic, well-developed one is a collaborative effort by many players, each manifesting their different powers in different stages of development. Only by experiencing all these different stages can one understand the entirety of the developmental process. It is with these thoughts that the author wants to take up the next position, away from the corporate and into the NGO world.
For the author, meeting many people with careers in "aid-based development" has been the first real, observable exposure to such international field work. And it is unfortunate that the exposure has not been particularly positive. There are many real cases of communities being hurt in the long term by spiraling dependence on aid that has often come as cash handouts without knowledge transfer of how the said communities can become economically sustainable in their own means. When the projects pull out, the communities simply fall back into poverty.
Most of the development professionals seem pretty oblivious to the cycle of dependence that they help create in remote communities, and private sector professionals often waste no time in criticizing NGOs for inefficient expenditure of resources that, private sector believes, can obtain much better returns if invested as businesses rather than given out as developmental aid. The author was even told, by someone in the private sector with NGO experience, that on average, for every $10 that goes into a NGO, only $0.5 makes it to the end client, while the remaining $9.5 is spent on administrative and marketing costs.
Given stories like these, it is easy to be cynical about whether NGOs in developing countries are necessary in the first place. Yes, they tend to distort the local markets by injecting it with huge amounts of financial resources that locals cannot produce on their own, and in the process may even amplify previously small-time cases of corruption into political rivalries that endanger the very political construct of a nation. But at the end of the day, the cynics forget the fact that the comparison is not between the $0.5 used and the $9.5 wasted, but between $0.5 that did end up with the locals vs $0 if NGOs are not present.
Indeed, for all the problems that NGOs purportedly cause in their host countries (of which many are quite real and quite serious), the fact that they are there to make some sort of efforts through trial and error has valuable lessons for humanity. After all, for all the criticisms that the private sector pile upon the NGOs, it is hardly imaginable that the same private sector firms and professionals will launch themselves into these underdeveloped countries as viable substitutes for the NGOs they criticize. Simply said, the lack of basic levels of economic development in these countries means there is little incentive for private firms' entry.
For the author himself, the above limitations of private firms have not been made anymore clearer after working with a startup firm here in Southeast Asia. The firm of course has brought values to the region in that it created a new industry that provide a convenient new service for the growing middle-class population. But simultaneously, it ignores the fact that the region remains deeply hampered by systemic poverty that afflicts a much larger percentage of the overall population, a group that the firm neither has the commercial interest or the capacity to support or assist in anyway.
As such, even for cynics of aid-based development (like the author himself), it is painfully obvious that private firms, by themselves, can only take advantage of good economic conditions created by other actors (most notably governments with favorable policies or investments, and international institutions that monitor them), but cannot become the condition-creators themselves. This is what truly distinguishes the NGOs and other public sector entities from profit-seeking companies, however innovative and motivated these companies may be.
And by experiencing both the private sector side and a NGO environment, one can gain a much fuller picture of how global economic development really works. The process of how a society transforms from an impoverished to a dynamic, well-developed one is a collaborative effort by many players, each manifesting their different powers in different stages of development. Only by experiencing all these different stages can one understand the entirety of the developmental process. It is with these thoughts that the author wants to take up the next position, away from the corporate and into the NGO world.
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