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Obstacles to progress

Distortions

What effect, if any, do NGOs have on specific development outcomes?
How do NGOs interact with other actors in their environments?

In what ways do NGOs contribute to the production or reproduction of cultural
categories or power dynamics?
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In our article, we wanted to show how a systematic review of existing work could answer

what is arguably the most debated of these questions, question 4--what effect do NGOs
have on development outcomes? We did so using a sample of articles on health and
governance, which represent the service provision and civil society functions of NGOs,

respectively.
We found that, on the whole, articles reported favorable effects of NGOs in these

sectors--67% for health and 52% for governance. But the evidence presented for these
claims gave us pause.

The health articles usually reported benefits to a health outcome or behavior, and 60% of
those articles gave a clearly measurable indicator on which to measure NGOs' success.
But the articles on governance, which often discussed how NGOs affected more

nebulous issues such as empowerment or accountability, gave a measurable indicator
only 16% of the time. Few of these articles included an explicit control group or

counterfactual, so it is impossible to know whether the outcomes could have been
achieved by other means, or even with no intervention at all “
"NGOs and International Development: What Have We Learned, 383
How Did We Learn It, and Where Should NGO Research Go Next?"
HistPhil (blog), October 17, 2018. https://histphil.org/2018/10/17/NGOs-and-international-
development-what-have-we-learned-how-did-we-learn-it-and-where-should-NGO-research-go-next/.

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Corporatisation

A growing share of aid is spent by private firms, not charities
“ "THE gold rush is on!" That is how a cable from the American ambassador to Haiti
described the descent of foreign firms upon Port-au-Prince in early 2010.

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During the following two years $6bn in aid flooded into a country of 10m people, for

everything from rebuilding homes to supporting pro-American political parties. Of
$500m or so in aid contracts from the American agency for international development

(USAID), roughly 70% passed through the hands of private companies.
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