Where Have All the NGOs Gone

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

During our more than a year of advocacy on the prevalent drug addiction problem here in Bohol, nothing has been heard so far from what used to be an articulate and socially committed NGO community. Something must have happened that local NGOs have lost collectively their voice to comment on a social problem that can be be considered more dangerous than insurgency.

In the war against insurgents, the battle fronts are defined; you aim your ideological bullets to hit the hearts and minds of the people where the initial battle is fought. Physical annihilation efforts are quite predictable and can often be won by superior strategy and more effective weapons.

In the war against drug addiction, however, the family hides the victims out of shame or fear of public opinion. The drug users are turned eventually into pushers themselves so they can afford their habit and, hence, the problem becomes self-perpetuating while multiplying drug-related crimes, including rape and murder on a scale previously unheard of before in our beloved province.

The network of drug producers/suppliers, distributors and sales agents seems to be a little bit more complicated than the structures created during the decades-old war for political and territorial control waged by the insurgents.

What is perceived generally as a family-based problem should become a matter of concern for the entire community and the broader society as well, but the usually articulate NGOs are unusually quite during this critical time. They have not found it important to help lead the way to rehabilitate hundreds of young people victimized by the illegal drug trade in the province.

Indeed where have all the NGOs gone at a time when their voice is needed to encourage families to speak out and not be afraid to seek help for their afflicted members whose number seems to be exponentially growing from day to day? Where are the militant NGOs who have spoken boldly in the past about environment and other popular issues? Indeed where have all the NGOs gone, they of various stripes and colors proclaiming love of country and the poor?

One relevant question to ask is: are there still genuine NGOs in Bohol? Perhaps due to a combination of factors, what we used to call NGOs have actually metamorphosed into something else due largely to lack of funding to maintain operations; lack of local support from the communities where they operate; or simply lack of management skills to survive as autonomous and vibrant organizations working with Government and local communities.

What we call as NGOs now may actually be groups funded by the Government, political parties or varied interest groups, as well as donors, and not the NGOs we used to know before which existed to build genuine partnership with local communities and sectors or specific population groups with difficulty to access services or to be part of mainstream development planning  and implementation processes.

Perhaps our NGOs are approaching extinction due to varied causes, namely: the inability to support themselves financially; a severe lack of committed staff and volunteers; too much dependence on grants from the Government and donors, who normally will not extend administrative support to financially weak partner NGOs; indifference at various levels of the Government to their plight due to political considerations; lack of community support, or lack of capability on the part of local communities to support partner NGOs.

These constraints need to be addressed systematically if we want a functioning NGO or Civil Society Organization (CSO) system in Bohol. It may not be realistic to expect the Government to do this monumental task for the simple reason that it benefits more from the present arrangement. In co-opting NGOs by hiring them to do service delivery and other functions, it does away with a potential source of opposition to its programs and policies. Government is also assured generally of competent and dedicated staff when it hires from the NGOs.

This silence from the NGOs regarding the drug menace in the province may be due to the current propensity to wait for clear cues from higher authority on how to respond to such a problem. On their own, they may have lost the capacity to define moral and developmental imperatives required by a situation quite unique to their experience and expertise. It has become easier for the NGOs to just wait and see and not run the risk if they blaze new trails in their current efforts.

Probably I will receive brickbats and unsavory remarks from NGO colleagues, but the familiar cheap psychologizing efforts will be counter-productive. We have to work for the common good to save our mission in the face of the general indifference that prevails in our midst. In this development journey, leaders must arise from the NGOs themselves and address the seeming lethargy and indifference to social issues that scream for attention and involvement.   

As in other unpleasant circumstances, let common problems unite us. Here is what Jonathan Glennie writes in The Guardian about the global outlook, which also reflects our local situation level:

“The NGO sector enters 2016 unsure of its way forward. The factors encouraging division are strong, from the funding and media marketplace, to ideological political positioning, to genuinely complex analyses of the international context. None of this is new, but there is more uncertainty than usual.

“So what to do? The answer is simple, even if implementing it will not be. To overcome divisions, and to build a more shared understanding of what is going right and wrong in the world, the organizations that make up the sector, and the people who make up those organizations, need to redouble their efforts to work together, meet together and build a collective front.

“There is an unfortunate tendency within the sector to criticize other organizations: ‘This one is too radical and has lost its credibility’, ‘This one is too conservative and has lost its credibility’. The reality is that people who work in the sector hop from one organization to another. They tend to be loyal, not so much to particular organizations but to their mission, their vision of a better world, a vision that, broadly understood, is shared by all the organizations in the sector. xxx

“Living in a bubble, NGO-ers can allow themselves to be blinded by day-to-day differences of opinion on strategy, failing to see the important reality that they all have much more in common than differences.

“The forces ranging against progress are many and they are powerful: negligence, lethargy or active resistance to a more just world. Without joint-purpose and joint-working, NGOs will not achieve what their many supporters expect them to.”

Like NGOs in other parts of the world, this divisiveness among us has probably contributed to the seemingly comatose state of the NGO community here in Bohol. However, this may be secondary to the primary illness, which is the lack of financial sustainability.

On this matter, I find relevant what a reader in the Guardian says:

“NGOs need to reinvent their funding models. The dependence on big institutional donors such as DFID and USAID is not sustainable. Social enterprises, impact investors and new age philanthropies will probably progressively have more influence than traditional donor dependent NGOs. There could also be some consolidation of the sector, with complementary NGOs merging. But more importantly, NGOs must innovate to remain relevant.”

Perhaps the worsening drug addiction problem in Bohol can serve as the clarion call for the NGOs to rise up and be counted to help save souls by supporting Bohol’s first drug rehabilitation center, the FITWBK Chemical Dependency Center in Baclayon, Bohol. Note: this is just a suggestion. Any unifying cause will do.

For more information about Bohol’s drug rehab center, kindly visit its website: Fitwbk.weebly.com.  #Boholngos4abetterworld

NMP/21 January 2016/5.25 p.m.