Når de rige landes NGOer skal slippe grebet over de lokale i Syd

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I så fald må de “store fra Nord” overlade meget mere ansvar og flere penge til deres lokale partnere i Syd-landene – men gør de så også dét i praksis? Nogle gange ja, og andre gange nej – den sidste kategori dominerer billedet klart.

DAKAR, 20 December 2013 (IRIN): UN agencies and international NGOs (INGOs) are increasingly stressing the need to reach out to new partners, including local NGOs, to build their capacity to respond to humanitarian crises.

Yet agencies are still said to “arrive, set the agenda, do their activities and leave,” said Sayadi Sani, head of the local Nigerien nutrition (ernærings) NGO Befen. How can aid agencies better empower local NGOs?

A recent study by the accountability and learning non-profit ALNAP concluded that partnerships between INGOs and local NGOs were too often reactive and shaped by “ad hoc interactions that take place at the point of crisis.”

Humanitarian actors were not yet systematic about partnerships, it said.

Some of the weaknesses of partnership models included:

* limited time and funding for capacity building or emergency preparedness;
* inadequate monitoring (utilstrækkelig opsyn med) and evaluation frameworks for assessing partners’ work; and
* deprioritizing developing strategies with partners.

Building up partners

All of the NGOs IRIN spoke to said they built partners’ capacity in some form or other, and most had training schemes.

ACTIONAID puts many of its partners through a human rights-based approach training programme, it said.

And because many of its partners are chosen for their expertise in, say, women’s rights or labour rights, ActionAid is learning from them as well, said the group’s humanitarian and resilience head, Bijay Kumar.

SAVE THE CHILDREN extends some of its trainings, including child-rights approaches and household economy analysis, to partners. Christian Aid organizes trainings for partners in all sorts of areas, from accountability standards to cash programming and monitoring and evaluation.

Most agreed that funding is a problem.

“Funds for the replication (gentagelse) of trainings for local staff from partners are difficult to find,” said Serge Beremwoudgougou, emergency project officer with CHRISTIAN AID, which taps into its own privately collected funds to train partners.

ActionAid often taps into its child sponsorship funds to finance training.

“Often the capacity to develop partnerships is not there in donor financing,” said ActionAid’s Kumar.

Letting partners set the agenda

Læs videre på
http://www.irinnews.org/report/99369/how-to-empower-local-ngo-partners