Thoughts on NGOs in Bénin

Working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) during the last two weeks has started to give me a first-hand taste of the frustrations within the field of development.

There are countless NGOs in Bénin: orphanages, micro-loans, health education. The list goes on. The people initiating these groups see needs not being addressed, but they don't always know how to find the solution; there is an abundance of compassion and awareness without adequate education. Many of the NGOs have staff members who are older than I am, who have not even completed high school (the secretary I work with is in her mid twenties but only has her 6th grade certificate). This causes them to struggle with correctly preparing documents, reports, and applications that donors expect to see before granting them funds, which then makes it difficult for them to find financing.

Accompanying this are the incorrect assumptions about how foreign/external funding works. For example, the director of VAID has given me the vague assignment of finding financial partners, but she doesn't understand that most donations reward specific projects and innovative concepts, more than an organization as a whole. Along with this, the vast majority of donors are English-speaking, so if I help VAID submit an application for funding, there won't by anyone to continue the communication process after I leave. And even if I can manage to find them funding for a project right now, what good will that do in the long-term if they're left waiting for the next English-speaking intern to come along? If this pattern continues, their success as an organization will constantly be dependent on factors outside of their control.

Another frustration is that sometimes their goals are unrealistic, and hinder them from setting goals that can actually be accomplished. For example, I help at an orphanage of 45 children where the staff is convinced that they need their own hospital, since they can barely afford to take children to the local one. They have not considered the cost of land, construction, materials, maintenance, medication, and staffing that would be necessary for the creation and upkeep of such a facility. NGOs here have repeatedly seen other groups receive hand outs, so a relationship of dependence on European/American countries is sustained and a simplistic assumption has been perpetuated of there being an ocean of money in the land of white people, and all that needs to be done is to find it. There is a lack of education about the complicated process behind all this, so while my current task at VAID is to find financial partners, my actual goal is to help them set up a realistic and sustainable way of receiving funding.

If you have any experience/ideas about finding local funding in Africa, I would love to here them.