The Impact of the International Community on NGO Development

NGO’s within the Caribbean region has gone through a catastrophic decline in operations over the past years, mainly due to forced political agendas seeking to utilize the movement as “guinea pigs” and to show seemingly work being done at the grass root levels single handly by successive governments who exploited this sector rather than facilitate its expansion and growth over the years.

Hence we are facing an increase is socio-economic challenges especially among recipients in rural (grassroots) communities across the Caribbean, which has grown to proportionate numbers especially with unemployment, health, crime, and violence.

NGO’s were once an effective tool used to capture these impacts, facilitate participation, partnerships and implement much-needed solutions in the years gone by.

The time is ripe for the development of more sustainable NGO’s within the Caribbean, for many are dying due to the loss of community we all are facing across the board. This would have worked best due to persons in that era collectively agreeing to help each other gain a voice and be recognized, as they were mostly marginalized groups.

However, we must give consideration that this is a new era plagued with the much economic crisis affecting the livelihoods of the very persons who make up the NGO community, the high cost of living and tax burdens being plagued on our people has severely impacted the NGO movement.

Therefore we have to re-engineer the process of building capacity through collaboration with local, regional and global stakeholders. In context, however, we definitely would require the provision of technical assistance and capital to cover the cost to enable such organizations to become sustainable once again, this is where the impact is felt most from the International community.

While they have much needed tangible resources they also come with their own economic and political agendas in many cases wanting to force their partisan\country agendas on us, treating us as “beggars” and not sustainable development partners. We must not be tempted to give in to such strategies as that in itself would not be sustainable.

We must be wise in making sure such assistance is by grant and not loans, which would further sink our economies deeper into debt as our governments seem to consistently do as an easy way out, and when we have achieved such resources that we utilize them in the most sustainable methods possible.

We have to continue to develop niche sustainable development programs that help achieve similar outputs as the SDG’s but with the Caribbean context in mind at all times, and to do this one of the best ways we can go forward is to transition all our NGO’s towards the “social enterprise model” this will almost guarantee economic sustainability and automatic capacity building of our human capital among many other benefits.

Stakeholders would no longer see NGO’s as a charity but rather valuable sustainable development partners providing a much needed critical social service to its recipients specifically in helping to create sustainable livelihoods for all.

There, we can achieve cross-cutting benefits for all, namely:

1) Stakeholder development outputs achieved consistently

2) The grass root capacity building of resilient citizens across the Caribbean

3) Establishment of more social enterprises that solve many of the socio-economic challenges that plague us on a daily basis. for example “Agripreneurship, Tech- Start-Ups, Climate mitigation innovations”., whilst providing sustainable livelihoods for each citizen across the board and strengthening local and regional economies, a must as pointed out by the Caribbean Development Bank.

4) International Community can provide much needed tangible resources to help us build a unique brand of Caribbean NGO’s and best practices.

I strongly believe if we utilize our international community to build partnerships and not continue to trend as just “poor me” organisations and people we can utilize our NGO community to build a much stronger, resilient Caribbean people, that will not be outnumbered by populations or by resources but will become a force to be reckoned with because we took the time to develop our human capacity through a once proven and result oriented system.

@Dr. Ashley C. John