Alene i Uganda opererer 7.000 frivillige og private foreninger og organisationer – Whether or not an NGO receives foreign funding is the biggest single factor in its survival
LONDON/KAMPALA, 18 October 2011 (IRIN): In 2002, when British and South African researchers first studied the voluntary sector in Uganda, there were about 3.500 NGOs registered in the country.
Six years later, in 2008, there were 7.000 – a similar proliferation seen all over East Africa.
Trudy Owens from Nottingham University and Ronelle Burger, from the University of Stellenbosch, set out to investigate whether foreign funding was the main reason some NGOs collapsed while others survived, why some attracted foreign donors; and how many were legitimate.
Their findings were recently released by Nottingham University’s Centre for Research in Economic Development and International Trade.
They chose 300 groups at random from the 3.500 then listed, ranging from small rural development organizations and conservation charities to national branches of Oxfam and Save the Children; about 20 percent had some kind of religious affiliation.
Owens told IRIN they found their suspicions about “shell” (tomme) NGOs were all too justified when they did their initial trawl. – Very few of them actually existed. Many were set up just to attract the money, she said.
Eventually, though, they came up with a list of 300 genuine NGOs, with various funding sources.
Outside grants came from the UN and the World Bank, from bilateral aid – especially from the US, the UK and the Netherlands – and from international NGOs. They also received local donations and membership fees.
Six years later Owens and Burger went back to Uganda to see which groups had survived. Owens remembers meeting the director of one NGO in a café.
– It had no office, it had run out of money, but it was still registered as a charity, she had no other employment and against all the evidence she insisted that it was still operating, she said.
There had been some casualties, but even among the poorest 20 percent of NGOs, more than 70 percent were still in existence, as were 68 percent of the NGOs that received no foreign funding.
– They survive on goodwill. Very few Ugandans are rich, but they do give donations, Owens added.
Even so, whether or not an NGO received foreign funding was the biggest single factor in its survival.
How long it had been established made a small difference, as did the experience of its leadership, but how effectively it performed made no significant difference at all.
Funding criteria
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