A project to improve access to
urban land for the poor implemented by a local NGO in South Africa used to be
funded by the United Kingdom’s aid agency, but last March that money dried up
and the organization had to close shop.
 |
|
U.K. Secretary of State for International
Development Justine Greening.
Photo by: Ryan Rayburn / World
Bank / CC
BY-NC-ND
|
The program implemented by Urban
LandMark had been receiving support from the U.K. Department for International
Development since 2008, gradually increasing until 2011, when from
903,827 pounds ($1.4 million) the funding dropped to 393,025 pounds.
The money then picked up for the
period 2012-2013, reaching more than 1 million pounds. But that was the end of
it, a source who spoke on condition of anonymity told Devex. The organization
tried looking for alternative sources of funding, but the attempts have been
futile.
Today the organization is nothing but
virtual —
no more staff, no more office, just a website.
DfID no longer renewed the grant for
the program. When and what the circumstances are for this decision remain
unclear, but the case study paints a picture of how the United Kingdom’s
decision to end aid to South Africa by 2015 has already trickled down to
several nonprofit organizations that are struggling to make ends meet in the
country.
A “smart” move?
In the immediate aftermath of the
announcement, SANGONeT, a network of South African NGOs, said the U.K.’s
withdrawal provides an
opportunity for South Africa to end its dependence on aid.
Some agree. A number of Devex readers
described the move as “smart.” But others, such as Carlos Orte, COO of the
TB/HIV Care Association, don’t approve at all.
“While the amount of aid received is
very small (0.3% of GDP), it ensures critical services are provided to people
that are underserved by government services,” Orte told Devex.
U.K. Secretary of State for
International Development Justine Greening’s words — “South Africa is now in
a position to fund its own development” —
has raised a lot of questions among aid groups that have work in the country:
Just how did DfID come to that conclusion?
Of course, the skirmish over whether
the South African government was consulted or not remains contentious. But
almost everyone Devex has spoken to said huge inequalities remain across the
country.
Only 28 percent of adult South
Africans have access to credit, a “persistently stubborn high unemployment
rate” affects the working population and “large pockets of poverty” are
reported particularly among the black population and female-headed households,
as well as high infection rates of HIV and AIDS, according to data
from the World Bank.
“The unresolved set of complex
economic challenges has locked South Africa into a low-level equilibrium of low
growth, persistent poverty and widespread exclusion and unemployment,” the bank
explains.
Danny
Sriskandarajah, secretary-general of CIVICUS and a Devex London 40
under 40 awardee, said GDP or the average income of people does not at all tell
much about a country.
“Anyone who’s done first year
economics will know that the average can hide a very complex context, so if you
just look at average income in SA or in some of these emerging economies, that
doesn’t tell you much about what’s happoening at the bottom of the pyramid,” he
argued. “That’s the danger we’re falling into. Average income are going to
define aid expenditure, when we know average doesn’t tell us about the poorest
end of the income spectrum.”
The NGO reality
The truth is, not so much U.K. aid
goes to NGOs in South Africa. DfID sources told Devex roughly 12 percent of the
agency’s 19 million pound per year program for the country is allocated to
nonprofit organizations.
But even in a country increasingly
being eyed as an emerging donor in its own right and which many donors see as
not needing lots of aid money, funding is still funding. DfID’s withdrawal,
Orte said, will “put more pressure [on NGOs we work with], making the
competition for [the] remaining funding even more fierce.”
In fact, this could also have an
impact to “well-funded” groups such as the TB/HIV Care Association.
“TB/HIV Care does not receive funding
from DfID, but we collaborate with other organizations that are funded to some
extent by DfID (…) This will probably result in our organization having to
devote even more resources to proposal writing,” he said.
“In addition, when because of funding
cuts, there is a shortage of supportive services and partner organisations to
which we can refer cases with special needs, delivering our own core services
becomes more difficult,” Orte added.
Sriskandarajah said not a week goes by
in South Africa these days where an NGO closes down or scales back its
activities.
Even SANGOCO, a national umbrella body
for NGOs, is currently being housed by CIVICUS because “they were finding it
difficult at the moment to make ends meet.”
Government funding
The HIV/TB Care Association has wide
sources of funding, from PEPFAR, the Stop TB Partnership, a subgrant from the Global Fund
to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, individual donations and
even the provincial government of Western Cape.
But this may not be the case for a
number of local NGOs, and Sriskandarajah argued the South African government
has not quite developed its strategy yet for supporting them.
“The state has enough trouble
[addressing priorities such as health care and education] … let alone trying to
support local NGOs,” he suggested.
Indeed, the government’s much-talked
about South African development aid agency has yet to be fully established.
“My worry is that these are still
early days. There aren’t huge resources available, certainly not at the
national level. And so without external or donor support, there’s a risk key
development outcomes will be undermined,” Sriskandarajah said.
“DfID is the first of donors to pull
back out of South Africa. If the state is not gonna step in to fill that role
of supporting civil society, then we really are in a difficult situation.”
No comments:
Post a Comment