ILEIA Newsletter • 8 nº 2 • July 1992
Will NGO-GO links solve all problems?
All around the world, the need for NGOs and government to work together is realised. In South America a conference was organised to take the first steps.
The 1970s and 1980s in South America saw repressive governments that did little for small farmers and generally tried to impose top-down approaches to agricultural development. In response, many grassroots development workers created NGOs to seek alternative ways of working with small farmers. These alternatives were often based on participatory approaches to technology development, low-external-input agriculture and the empowerment of local organisations.
For long periods it was politically difficult for NGOs to develop contact with government organisations (GOs) in this work, but now things are changing. With democracy breaking out in the region, it is less difficult for NGOs and GOs to work together and increasingly GOs say they want to work in more sensitive and participatory ways with small farmers. To be able to do so, they want to work with and learn from NGOs. National programmes about to begin in Bolivia and Ecuador will bring NGOs and GOs closer together in rural development and in the generation and transfer of agricultural technology. In Chile, NGOs already spend much time in government co-ordinated on-farm research and technology transfer programmes.
The first step
In December 1991, NGOs and government organisations from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru and several international organisations met in Santa Cruz, Bolivia at the workshop 'The generation and Transfer of Agricultural Technology: the Role of NGOs and the Public Sector'. Participants discussed the strengths and weaknesses of NGOs and GOs, analysed the potential gains and pitfalls of NGO-GO collaboration, and made recommendations on follow-up steps in NGO-GO relations in their own countries and in general.Potential gains
According to the NGOs, among the main problems they face are lack of time, information and resources to do research. And anyway, research should be the responsibility of the public sector, with GOs making the results more easily available to NGOs. GOs should also allow NGOs to exert influence over research programmes so that they incorporate small farmer knowledge and address issues arising from their production systems. Another NGO problem is the inefficiency resulting from isolation and poor co-ordination with other institutions. Regional technology co-ordination and discussion committees combining GOs, NGOs and farmers could increase the efficiency of GO and NGO efforts.This would also allow NGOs to begin influencing GO thinking and policies. For GOs, their main weaknesses have been a lack of farmer participation, a concentration on high-input technologies, and increasingly a lack of resources as public budgets are slashed. It was suggested that NGOs could help with all these- training GOs in participatory approaches, incorporating PTD in GOs, and orienting GOs on rural peoples' farming needs and on lower-input and agroecological technologies. GOs also wanted NGOs to take over more responsibility for extension, for managing on-farm trials and for providing the two-way bridge between researchers and small farmers.
The risks
For NGOs, the main risk of increased links to GOs is that the proposals to involve them in GO programmes are really just attempts to use NGOs to subsidise public cutbacks, rather than efforts to learn from them. NGOs do not want simply to replace GOs - they want to make existing services more participatory and appropriate. Nor do NGOs want to implement programmes designed and controlled by GOs. There would be little justification in being an NGO if this is all that they did. Another risk is that NGOs' relationship with small farmers, and their work in LEISA, could both be weakened by links with GOs. NGOs' strengths come from the time they commit to working alongside rural people, learning with them and working for them. Linkages to GOs might reduce this time, and place NGOs under more pressure to meet GOs' requirements rather than the needs of rural people.Mechanisms of linkage
Like farmers and extensionists, GO and NGO staff need to become acquainted, trust, respect, understand and learn to listen to each other before they can work together effectively. The workshop discussed many different linkage mechanisms, but in almost all cases, successful outcomes occurred when NGO-GO relationships were based on informal and personal contacts. This is more likely to happen at a local level, and there appeared to have been more success in local relationships. But informal relations are not enough to keep things going -when your trusted contact in another organisation leaves, the inter-organisational relationship usually comes to an end. Nor do informal contacts allow influence over programme and policy design. So formalisation should be the ultimate goal, even though it means more time and paperwork.Proposals for the future
In general, the participants favoured more links between NGOs and GOs. But much remains to be learnt and progress will not be as quick as current proposals for collaboration suggest. Therefore, in each of the countries NGOs and GOs need to continue knowing more about each other's work, through forums for discussions, diagnostic surveys of NGO and GO work, and inter-institutional committees for designing and monitoring research and extension. Finally, the GOs and NGOs present recognised that they have each had failure due to insufficient farmer participation in technology development and transfer. Alongside attempts to make GO-NGO relations more efficient and open, there must also be continued efforts by both to involve farmers and their organisations much more fully in their work.Anthony Bebbington
ODI
Regents College, London
NW1 4NS, UK
Martin Prager
Celater
AA 6555, Cali
Colombia
Graham Thiele, Penny Davies, Jonathan Wadsworth
BTAM
Casilla 359, Santa Cruz
Bolivia
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