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Obstacles to progress

Distortions

"It is a real tragedy when respectable progress in Africa is reported as a failure by
international organizations and external observers," Vandemoortele wrote, voicing the

suspicion that particular measurements have been selected "so as to present Africa as a
failure, solely to gain support for a particular agenda, strategy, or argument.”
Columbia Journalism Review (April 2011) 382
Karen Rothmyer

*****
Exaggerating NGO significance and achievements

“ By the new millennium, major development agencies had integrated NGOs into their
ways of doing business. More than 20% of OECD aid now flows through NGOs, and 88%

of World Bank-funded projects include the participation of an NGO.
***
One part of our article used content analysis of a random sample of 300 articles to
closely examine the authors, research questions, and methods of the NGO literature. We

found that like many scholarly fields, NGO studies are dominated by academics working
in developed countries.

Only 16% of articles included an author based at a university in Asia, Africa, or Latin
America.
Certainly, limiting our analysis to articles in English accounts in part for this unevenness,

but we noted that only two articles in the 300-article sample were written by scholars at
Indian universities. This is despite India being the most commonly studied country in this

literature, and one that uses English as the primary language in higher education.
This unequal representation of authors provides some evidence for the North-South

knowledge gap that political scientists and other social scientists have discussed. We
also found that about one-third of articles had at least one nonacademic author; more

than half of such authors were employees of NGOs, suggesting both possible subject
matter expertise as well as potential bias in reporting organizational effects or
outcomes.

***
Despite changes over time, nearly all of the articles we analyzed addressed one of six

broad research questions:
What is the nature of NGOs?

What factors lead to the emergence, development or evolution of NGOs or the
NGO sector?

How do NGOs carry out their work?