Local NGOs: The Other Tsunami and Post-Conflict Victims
in Aceh Province
[note: we have eliminated the names of the agencies involved for
this blog post.]
After natural disasters or
wars ravage developing areas of the world, large international aid
organizations who arrive to provide assistance are often surprised, and
humbled, to find small groups of local citizens already working or organizing,
in whatever limited capacity they might have, despite being victims
themselves. This was the case in Aceh
province, Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami killed over 170,000 Acehnese
citizens and revealed to the world the nearly irrevocable damage to both the economic and social health of the province that
had already been caused by the ongoing conflict between Acehnese separatists
and the Indonesian government. In Banda
Aceh after the tsunami, a concerned group of citizens formed and registered a
non-profit agency, Jembatan Masa Depan (Bridges to the Future) to help the
international community implement its recovery programs in the most difficult
to access and hardest-hit areas of the province. The agency was named after the international
organization that first assisted it—Building Bridges to the Future Foundation,
Inc. (BBF), based in New York. JMD’s
mission was to provide sustainable livelihoods assistance, post-tsunami and
post-conflict, to widows, fighting age males, and those marginalized
individuals who were deemed by large aid agencies to be too “difficult” to
access and too small in number to justify the expenditure of international
administration of projects. Over time,
it became apparent that the international community, in order to provide any
effective reconstruction or peace-building and sustainable economic assistance,
had to seek out, utilize, and help augment the services of local NGOs such as
JMD. However, in Aceh, even throughout
the four years of active reconstruction administered through the Agency of
Reconstruction and Rehabilitation (BRR), the established
government/international partnership organization, international aid
organizations, themselves the beneficiaries of billions of dollars in
multi-donor funds, provided little or no technical assistance to established
local NGOs. They hired many Acehnese
citizens, to be sure, and improved their individual capacities, but this only
served to create a cycle of dependence on the international presence for those positions
for which they were qualified. Local NGOs, including JMD, lacked the
administrative capacity to go toe to toe against a preferred international
“implementing partner,” in terms of accounting and reporting ability, work plan
development (in English), strategic planning, recruitment, HR, monitoring,
etc.
This
failure on the part of international agencies to devote monetary resources and
training to strengthen existing local NGOs and help fledgling community groups
prepare to formalize their efforts was extensively documented in several
international assistance assessments, including the 2006 NGO Impact Initiative. One
of the key areas that was inadequately addressed with respect to response and
reconstruction, notes the study, was that of Enhancing Local Capacity. The workgroup devoted to this area repeats
throughout the document that “to a significant extent, local ownership of
the tsunami response was undermined by the actions of international agencies.
In some cases, recognition and engagement with local capacities was totally
lacking . . . . Underlying the problems
at the community level [was] a lack of engagement at the earliest stages with
community-based and local non-governmental organizations…many of [which] had
played a major role during the search and rescue phase.”
Despite the calls to action by all members
of the working group and the collective authors of the entire study, lack of
international assistance to NGOs continues in Aceh. Unfortunately, the point is now nearly moot,
since JMD remains one of the few, if not the only, local NGOs remaining in Aceh
that provides sustainable livelihoods assistance to post-tsunami and
post-conflict communities. It is
referenced by large agencies in reports to donors eager to see “local
involvement.” It is courted obliquely to
fulfill the requirements of organizations such as the World Bank who
academically stress local involvement.
But there has been no organization and no funding source to date who has
offered to provide training and funding for JMD to survive in its own
country. Further, for the past three
years it appears as if the international aid community has partnered with
donors to do everything it can to wipe local, organized and sustainable
assistance from the face of Aceh.
Two months ago, the Indonesia
Department at USAID published USAID’s Democracy, Human Rights and Governance
(DRG) group’s Call for Papers for its “Local Capacity Development Summit” to be
held in June, 2012.The object of the Summit was “to learn about successful
local capacity development efforts of external partners and
organizations.” USAID Indonesia
encouraged affiliated organizations to write about “their most successful local
capacity development efforts” and share “innovative LCD experience and lessons
learned.” BBF has asked for those papers
from the Summit that were from NGO’s claiming to have had any “local capacity
development efforts” at all, never mind successful ones. To date, BBF has not received a response; it
would be interesting to see if there are indeed NGOs claiming to provide these
services to local partners in Indonesia. They are certainly not doing so in
Aceh, nor could they at this point.
JMD’s own investigations as well as a fairly exhaustive internet survey
reveals only six such NGO’s, and of these one is a Human Rights NGO network,
one deals with maternal health, one focuses on microfinance, one is
Jakarta-based, and one is the Jesuit Refugee Service Indonesia, which has been
inactive since 2009. The sixth one is
Jembatan Masa Depan itself, and it would gladly be the recipient of any type of
capacity building an international partner would care to give it. It is well known to the USAID Mission in
Jakarta, yet JMD’s attempts to stay connected and receive updates have been
routinely brushed aside. In 2009 a
component of Agency A’s USAID-funded “SERASI” initiative included JMD as an implementing partner, at the suggestion
of the USAID Mission. JMD had successfully implemented projects previously for Agency
A, to their great satisfaction, and JMD was in the middle of an additional Agency
A initiative in an extremely remote and difficult area, dealing with
communities who had heretofore never had contact with either a local or
international NGO. JMD, acting in good
faith spent a considerable amount of time drafting program plans, budgets and
finally contract documents with USAID. Agency
A had in fact asked JMD to notify the communities that JMD had been awarded the
contract, which it did. After both USAID
and JMD had signed the contract, Agency A refused to sign it. It would not tell JMD why. A JMD
representative travelled to Jakarta (not a small expense) to ask the USAID
Chief of Mission what the issue was, and was told that USAID could not communicate
with JMD because the contract was between JMD and Agency A. Agency A refused to tell the communities that
there would be no JMD project, so JMD lost considerable credibility with an
extremely volatile community whose trust it had finally earned. JMD was hurt but not surprised. It has rarely enjoyed equal partnership
status with any of the international agencies with whom it has worked, and for
whom it has taken over and administered projects.
The NGO Assessment also notes that “Humanitarian
proclamations, plans, programs and procedural guidelines abound with statements
about the array of benefits that the sector will gain when local organizations
and nationally recruited
personnel take their rightful place in the system. It is equally evident that
capacities are not being built
or utilized at the pace these claims would imply to be essential.
“The
findings from the tsunami response seem to indicate this is still true, that
standards developed are not being met and that lessons learned are not being
applied.” Most local providers would tend to agree
with this assessment, since virtually none have ever been informed what those
“lessons” were.
Several factors, state the report, have
contributed to this pushing aside of local NGOs, including “competition between service delivery and
capacity building.” It is this factor
that we would like to especially address in this document, as it has caused JMD
to re-evaluate its ability to continue functioning as an NGO; when it
dissolves, there will be no local NGOs
trained or supported in sustainable post-tsunami/post-conflict livelihoods
efforts, despite the billions of dollars that went to international
organizations to accomplish this.
The two years
immediately following the tsunami were necessarily devoted to emergency
stabilization and reconstruction activities.
It is from these years that the Report draws the majority of its
examples, acknowledging that capacity building may have been placed aside in
favor of timely responses that could not wait for local actors to form cohesive
and effective coalitions. However, all
was not a frantic humanitarian dash around the province. Large aid agencies were taking other factors
into consideration when administering assistance, such as the unforeseen
hazards of working in an area of still active internal conflict, the vast
economy of scale issues caused by the immense dispersal of small pockets of
victims throughout remote and hard-to-access areas, and the immediately
post-response media withdrawal that prompted many headquarters to order the withdrawal
of their organizations prior to the completion of specific and needed
activities. JMD found itself, in those
days, finishing project after project at the behest of large international
agencies who left them with little more than materials, some implementation
funds, and a hearty farewell. In one
case, JMD’s donor BBF went on BBC radio to underscore this lack of an exit
strategy by reminding listeners that on December 31 the majority of the large
NGOs were going to leave Aceh and some critical initiatives involving food
delivery and water purification, were going to be curtailed, leaving hundreds
of families with no drinking water and no ability to plant crops for food. But it was December 31 and time to go. This public announcement, however, prompted
Oxfam to provide training to JMD staff in operating the water plant, and the
Red Cross also stepped in to help with the water delivery, and JMD received a
grant to provide further water purification services to other villages in need. Machines were donated to continue clearing
the salinated crop fields. This type of
handing-off of projects happened time after time in 2005-2006. And at the time JMD consisted of three
people! But not once, as the NGO Assessment Report points out, did the
international community offer to strengthen the agency itself, to prepare it to
be autonomous and confident enough to be the direct link between donor
agencies, the government, and the affected communities.1
After 2006 and throughout
reconstruction, JMD was asked time after time to subcontract with an
international partner/recipient of funds from USAID, World Bank or other agency
funneling its respective government’s assistance to Aceh. The funds provided, however, were stipulated
to go to direct service only, with very little allocated to administrative
overhead (bookkeeping, reporting, office maintenance, travel, supplies,
utilities, staff development.) In fact,
one donor NGO refused to accept that field officers who were providing nothing
but training in livestock health, crop rotation, green farming techniques and
business skills were “direct service;” their insistence that JMD categorize
them as “administration” precluded the agency from being able to put in a line
item for true and necessary administrative costs. JMD has been unable to recoup sufficient
administrative costs to hire appropriate program development and management
staff. The foundation BBF currently
provides funding for all technical assistance to JMD; its hope was that during
the influx of funding through the European Union and EDFF’s assistance
post-tsunami, a portion of that assistance would be taken on by the
international community. It was never
so.
The following
examples are presumably typical of local NGOs in Aceh who were struggling to
survive after 2004. So few remain,
however, that it has been difficult if not impossible to chronicle their
trajectory into dissolution. JMD alone
remains because of the stubbornness and commitment of one private foundation,
not the international NGO community’s desire to assist in local NGO
sustainability, or the Indonesian government’s inclination to financially
support such entities. JMD’s future,
however, is bleak. Its most recent
“partnership,” for example, has resulted in the near gutting of the
agency.
In 2009 JMD
developed two highly sophisticated and well-received project proposals in
response to the Economic Development Financing Facility (EDFF)’s solicitation
for programs that would utilize the final portion of the multi-donor fund not
yet dispersed. Because of JMD’s
longstanding relationships with many government and international aid
representatives, it learned that one of its proposals was to be “appropriated”
by a high-ranking member of the government and modified to suit that
individual’s private foundation; the other project, aimed at rehabilitating a
large segment of the highly acclaimed Acehnese Robusta coffee industry, was
noticed by EDFF because JMD was the only local NGO proposing to provide
training to coffee farmers. Since
“partnership” with a local NGO put the stamp of approval on an international
NGO’s proposal, and because Robusta coffee was an internal product and deemed
by donors as mostly valuable to Indonesians, EDFF asked Agency B to consider
JMD to be the training partner for the award that Agency B, as a large
organization, was designated to receive.
One of the largest issues that local NGOs have faced is the
international donor community’s fear, often justified, that the immense
bureaucracy surrounding reporting and financial accounting methods alone would
render a local NGO incapable of managing a grant. Since none of the funds ever were reserved
for training Acehnese agencies in how to manage the funds themselves, agencies
like JMD were at the mercy of the international donors like Agency B if they
wanted to even participate in reconstruction projects.
A skeptical
reader of this account may be tempted to point out that that the international
NGOs worked exclusively in country, hiring over 90% Indonesian/Acehnese staff,
and as projects progressed, those staff were indeed trained in the nuances of
the administrative and reporting requirements of World Bank, USAID et al. Those staff, at this moment in time—the end
of the EDFF funding and the exodus of all international organizations—are now
well-trained individuals who must leave their home if they wish to find
employment, for there are no local agencies left for whom their skills would
have been such an asset. The international
NGOs created a community of trained nomads, and unless, individually, some
decide to form an association, band together, and seek yet another source of
funding to bind them together and accomplish a mission that as individuals they
were never trained to develop, Aceh itself will be no better off. Some of its citizens will have had
life-changing experiences, but this is not the sustainable development either
envisioned by EDFF or reported on by the NGO assessment.
Back to JMD’s involvement
with Agency B: JMD was a subcontractor, but was treated by Agency B as more of a
sub-grantee, which it was not. Being
inexperienced and lacking administrative capacity, however, contract
negotiations were not JMD’s strong suit.
The agency saw an opportunity to do what it does best—help people in
remote areas reclaim their livelihoods.
They assumed everything would work out; after all, they were being taken
care of by a large NGO. Agency B agreed
to pay JMD up to a set amount for a March 2011 to March 2012 project that
involved this tiny agency training 7 field officers, 50 farmer peer educators,
and 1,000 individual coffee farmers. The
fiscal reporting was challenging for both JMD staff and for Agency B’s Acehnese
staff, who were also learning the World Bank system. Reports were mis-filed, rules changed,
payments were late, and JMD learned that as an agency it was not able to
advance via this project; all the funds were going to direct service and
operational costs. At the end of the
year, the agency would not have been able to spend some of its contracted
amount on training for the fiscal director, hiring of more administrative
staff—anything that would make it better, larger, stronger for it to be in a
better position to continue its services when the contract ended. It realized that instead that it would be
merely depleted. The only thing Agenc yB
wanted JMD to do was work--until the work was done.
And then in
October 2011 Agency B told JMD that World Bank wanted Agency B to begin a five-month
no-cost extension—an unheard-of burden to place on a tiny local agency. JMD told Agency B that if Agency B wanted to continue
the project past the original end date, Agency B needed to keep paying JMD its
monthly allocation above and beyond the contracted amount. Agency B said it could in fact do this
because it had a surplus. This turned
out to be a manipulative distortion. The
“surplus” to which Agency B referred was the money that JMD had not yet spent
of its original year-long contract, which JMD was now being asked to stretch
out for 5 additional months. JMD reminded
Agency B that Agency B had asked it to start the project 2 months earlier than
March 2011 and still owed the donor—BBF-- that money. Agency B responded that it would not be
repaying BBF. Agency B had asked JMD to
sign a no-cost extension letter that included as an attachment a letter from
JMD requesting a monthly payment from Agency B.
The no-cost extension letter referred to JMD’s letter, stating that it
was “rejecting” that particular request.
Agency B held up payment to JMD for four months (from December 2011 to
March 2012) because it said that its own reading of JMD’s accounts showed it
had “enough money” to perform services.
As of May 2012 it was holding up February and March 2012’s payment. BBF’s financial intervention kept the agency
afloat, but barely. In fact, Agency B
was well aware that JMD would have to be placed even further into debt by Agency
B’s refusal to pay salaries during Ramadan, which falls at the crucial end of
programming. JMD was faced with a
choice: act despicably and fire all staff right before the holy holiday, or be
plunged further into debt and complete the project for Agency B.
Whether this is
all legal is not really the point. But
it is is astounding that a small local agency who trusted a large international
one and is now in its final months of programmatic work is basically
functioning as an indentured servant. This
servant, incidentally, provided the only positive results in a complex,
multi-faceted and multi-million dollar grant that included market development,
distribution expansion, and networking with cooperatives. Nothing but the JMD farmers’ training project
had positive results. Agency B will
argue that it bent over backwards to help JMD, that JMD’s reporting was always
sloppy, that its English documents were not coherent, that it “sat” with the
finance director to help her understand how World Bank wanted the forms. That is not capacity building, nor is it
helping the local agency survive, which should have been part of Agency B’s
mandate in the first place. That is
merely whipping the dying horse until the cart reaches the market and the fruit
is saved.
The above is just
one example of JMD’s experiences with international “partners.” During its Agency B project implementation,
it had looked to another agency, Agency C, for better treatment and,
not surprisingly, was again disappointed.
Since 2005 the
President of BBF had been speaking with World Bank colleagues in Jakarta and
Aceh about the need to provide competitive programming funds for small local
NGOs such as JMD. Although sympathetic,
her colleagues informed her that World Bank necessarily had to implement much
larger projects in scope and funding than local NGOs could handle. She asked that JMD at least be given the
opportunity to submit a proposal during an RFP process, but was denied this
request, as JMD “did not have the credibility.”
She asked how local agencies could achieve credibility if they were
never permitted to implement projects that could prove their credibility. But this was not World Banks’s concern. In late 2009 JMD learned, through colleagues
in Jakarta, that World Bank had awarded a multi-million dollar contract to Agency
C that included a sustainable livelihoods component based in areas in which JMD
had worked previously. She contacted the
head of World Bank in Aceh and asked why no RFP had gone out for this project
and was told that World Bank could decide to sole-source contracts from time to
time, and that Agency C had been a previous grantee in good standing, and had
done a similar project. BBF’s president
pointed out that JMD had been doing similar projects for several years. She then asked the question she had been
asking World Bank for years: what was the process whereby an agency applied to
World Bank for funds? She was told that
agencies submitted proposals and based on viability, need, etc. they were
funded, that no RFP process was required.
She then asked, “So after asking about funding for this local NGO for
years, no one has ever told me that we can just apply. Where may JMD now send its proposal?” After a confused silence and a referral to a
project director she was told that JMD couldn’t really apply . . .but could not
explain why an agency like Agency C could.
Although
unsatisfactory, the conversation apparently set some gears in motion because
shortly thereafter JMD received a call from Agency C, stating quite plainly
that the World Bank had contacted them and told them to sub-contract the
sustainable livelihoods portion of their new project to JMD. JMD was asked to develop a training and
implementation model and submit a proposal for this component, which it did in
early 2010, during many meetings with World Bank and Agency C at their offices
in Banda Aceh. This became the basis for
Agency C’s additional livelihoods sites, the existence of which JMD learned of several
months later. As the months wore on, Agency
C kept JMD informed of the “progress” that it was having in finalizing
contracts and language with World Bank.
JMD was asked no fewer than four times to revise its budget, its scope
of services, its timeline, and its staffing pattern. It complied each time, having been assured by
Agency C that these revisions were mere formalities and that signatures were
forthcoming. Due to several delays in
starting the ranger training component, Agency C urged JMD to be as ready as
possible for the moment when the contract would be signed. It urged JMD to hire staff, and welcomed
those staff at Agency C’s preliminary ranger trainings. It praised JMD’s choice of project
coordinator, and included him on subsequent correspondence. BBF fronted the several thousand dollars to
JMD so that it could comply with Agency C’s wishes and act in good faith, as a
willing partner would do. In April Agency
C informed JMD that World Bank had decided to reverse itself and that Agency C
could not name JMD as the sole source
contractor, and that Agency C had to publicly advertise for a
subcontractor. A seven-day response
window and another week of “review” revealed that of the only two responses
other than JMD, neither was from an NGO and neither was qualified. JMD had meanwhile re-written its proposal to
fit the guidelines of the RFP which appeared in the paper without Agency C letting JMD know where or when it would appear. Fortunately JMD staff had their eyes peeled
and spotted the ad two days before the deadline. Agency C apologized for the “oversight.”
One week later,
with community beneficiaries already asking about their livelihoods programs, Agency
C notified JMD that World Bank had decided that Agency C had not advertised nationally and so the RFP and responses
were invalid. Twenty days passed while a
new notice and response deadline were set.
JMD again re-wrote its proposal.
This time, it was the only NGO in Indonesia to apply. At that point, World Bank suddenly decided
that its regulations did permit sole
source sub-contracting, and permitted JMD to be the contractor.
There was a
catch, however. World Bank had decided
that the amount and manner in which Agency C and JMD had agreed that JMD would
be paid was now, after a year of negotiations, improper. JMD could only receive $52,000 for all its
services for a 6-staff person, 18-month project that involved 5 separate
geographic and remote areas. The
livelihood portion of the project totaled $560,000 and some of this, JMD had
been assured, could be used for training, transportation, M&E, etc. No more.
Agency C asked
JMD to produce a budget that it could “live with,” and JMD once again
re-drafted a work plan and budget. Two
months had passed and the project was now reduced to 16 months. Staff were
already on board and being trained.
Fiscal staff from both agencies had been discussing reporting and
meeting to go over forms. No contracts,
however, were forthcoming.
World Bank
rejected the revised budget. Agency C
notified JMD that too much time had passed, and that Agency C staff would
probably have to implement the livelihoods portion of the grant themselves,
unless JMD wanted to prepare an “assessment” report of the villages, for which Agency
C would pay one JMD staff person as an individual contractor $5,000. JMD asked what would happen to the staff who
were hired. Agency C responded that it
never encouraged JMD to hire staff before a contract was signed. JMD asked Agency C if they were quite pleased
with themselves for being able to finally shake off the pesky local NGO who had
had the nerve to question a sole source contract that was never advertised and
then promised a part of that contract only to be eased out of even that by a
series of newfound World Bank regulations. Agency C expressed appropriate indignation and
hurt. It can certainly never be proven,
but based on Agency C’s appropriation of JMD’s program model and prior
implementation of it with its own staff, it made more sense for the
international NGO to keep all the funds and run the project with its own people. It probably took longer than anticipated for Agency
C and World Bank to neutralize JMD, but at last, mission accomplished, and the
local agency withdrew, having spent $3,000 and uprooted three young men from
their homes and families to take what they thought would be the job of a lifetime.
There is, of
course, much more to this story—both of these stories--and it is certain that Agency
C and Agency B (and the World Bank representatives involved) would be eager to
offer a sincere and detailed explanation of why they did everything they did,
and how they went out of their way to assist a local NGO that apparently just
couldn’t be assisted. At the heart of
both of these examples, however, is the fact that at no time in any of the
planning or implementation of these large and overarching projects did either
donor or NGO address what they would do if given the opportunity to assist a
local NGO become autonomous and take over the work of what the large NGOs would
soon have to surrender. What is ironic
is that in both of these cases, the incredibly important work done by the
NGO—improving coffee production, protecting the rainforest—will be eventually
completely undermined by the lack of attention paid to the one pillar of
sustainability that could have been strengthened—a local community group
interested in a long-term success that goes beyond the individual. Neither of these NGOs has left nor will have
left in place a mechanism whereby the individual or group that was served can
seek additional support and encouragement.
You’re on your own, folks.
In 2008 the British Red Cross Assessment
of their own work found that one of the key lessons learned was that there had
not been enough capacity building of existing local groups and
organizations (A Summary of the British Red Cross Cash Grants For Livelihoods Recovery
in Aceh, Indonesia, 2008, by the IDL Group, LLC.) Using the Sustainable Livelihoods (SL)
approach to their cash awards (Mercy Corps had implemented a similar approach
in their Cash For Work initiative), and admittedly focused on recovery in the
early days, they relied on BRC staff alone to implement the program, but always
maintained that the SL approach “ensures relevance to the macro context in
which the disaster occurred and to the specific context in villages.” (p.5)
BRC saw recovery as a very long process
that did not just end with rebuilding.
SL was key to recovery and beyond, and one of their key “lessons
learned” was that “capacity building can be an effective tool to support grant
investments even in the short term. But
BCRS needs to ensure that the capacity building interventions can achieve
sustainable results within the recovery
program timeframe. (p.6, emphasis added).”
Even while acknowledging that local actors need to have the tools
necessary to further the SL process, this “lesson” is making it clear that
local knowledge and preparedness had better happen within the NGOs’ on-site
timeframe. Providing support for something that may happen after the NGO has
departed, such as group/agency autonomy, strengthening, trial and error, and
the making of independent choices and decisions, is a risky investment.
It can be argued that a far better model
for improving the capacity of local sustainable livelihoods organizations is
that which was used in the early 1990s by the US Center for Disease Control
(CDC) when working with individual states to fund HIV/AIDS prevention outreach
programs. The CDC had already conducted
hundreds of controlled studies which had proven that decreases of certain
behaviors reduced the spread of HIV/AIDS by specific percentages. Meanwhile, local street outreach models had
proven effective in accessing hard-to reach and at-risk populations. The CDC recommended that funding be granted
to those agencies who disseminated the specific information that their studies
had shown was appropriate, and so “success” was achieved when the logic
framework used by local agencies indicated that the contact was made, and the
information given. Agencies did not have
to wait around to see if the results of their “capacity building” brought down
the T-cell count of an already infected drug user, or if it stopped a specific
individual from having unprotected sex.
The CDC wisely said that the agency (and the funding source) could assume with confidence that this would be the result. The agency had made
appropriate inferences about the long-term value of the immediate intervention,
and recommended funding for initiatives accordingly.
This was never done in post-tsunami and
post-conflict Aceh. It would have taken
too long for an NGO to reap the rewards (i.e. file the appropriate
self-congratulatory exit report) of seeing a trained local staff tackle the
business of community renewal by themselves.
If it couldn’t happen within the life of their initiative, they didn’t want to fund it.
Small local NGOs spend
countless hours obeying the conflicting wishes of international donors and
large NGOs, only to be kicked to the curb at the last minute with no
recourse. In developing countries where
the concept of “volunteerism” and “not-for-profit” is often unheard of and
sometimes scorned, the strengthening of civil society should be at the heart of
every global assistance package.
Although Aceh is an extreme example of the failure of international organizations
to successfully prepare a region’s citizens to administer all its own social
service, economic development, health, and education programs, it is quite
probably the case that wherever there is conflict or a natural disaster that
prompts a global outpouring of resources, there will be developed a method in
which everything but the immediate fix departs with the foreign organizations,
including the majority of the money, and the knowledge of how to get it back.
There is no way to reverse
this trend except to reverse it. The
international donor community must be willing to provide separate awards that
identify, evaluate, and train local NGOs to become the partners of record in
their own countries. This involves the
provision of international experts who actually train the local staff, as
opposed to performing their work for them, no matter how tempting that may be
(cf the UN’s “rebuilding” of East Timor’s government institutions from
2000-2003). This involves sending
appropriate expert trainers to local agencies who understand the real meaning of capacity building, and then
actually do it, and leave. This
shadowing/training should be conducted with the local agency for a year at
minimum. The agency should then be
provided with a year’s worth of operating expenses while it employs all the
techniques and tactics it has been given, from grant seeking to policy
development to recruitment to Board and Staff development to project
development to human resources to fiscal management and accounting. Anything
less will result in failure.
Jembatan Masa Depan works
diligently to improve the quality of life of Acehnese citizens, is staffed by
individuals who forego comfort and risk their safety daily to provide services
to their fellow citizens, is commended by the national and international media,
is respected and sought-after by international agencies and government
representatives—and all these positive attributes cannot save it. The international donor community must stop
re-active funding to Aceh, and concentrate on its future. And its future does not lie with anyone or
any agency other than those that were established here and who must live here.
Notes/Addenda
1The President of the donor agency Building Bridges to the Future
Foundation arrived in Aceh shortly after the tsunami. She was at the time neither president nor
donor, merely a retired banking executive in Jakarta who wanted to understand
the extent of the damage in Sumatra.
Horrified by what she witnessed, she quickly set up a private foundation
(BBF) and sought out the assistance of a group of like-minded Acehnese citizens
to secure shelter and provide basic health and safety needs for as many
residents as possible. The group became
Jembatan Masa Depan, and where gaps in resources or assistance developed, JMD
consistently sought to fill them.
Between 2005 and 2006, for example, on the west coast of Aceh near the
epicenter of the earthquake, JMD designed and built a total of 51 houses, a
women’s education/livelihood center, and a sustainable water system, as well as
initiating several distinct livelihoods projects, and it did this with
$240,000, approximately $150,000 of which was a private donation from the
President. The balance of the funds, and the majority of the materials, were
coming from international agencies who had received word from their
headquarters that they could no longer remain in the province due to either
security concerns, economy of scale issues, or lack of sufficient publicity
after the tsunami became “old news.”
JMD’s dedication and continued
presence in marginalized areas deemed by larger and more well-equipped agencies
too “difficult” to appropriately address or made too dangerous due to vestiges
of the civil conflict, resulted over time in awards and hand-overs from other
international aid agencies to develop a variety of health promotion and
sustainable agricultural and livestock livelihood activities including a
women’s health clinic, a sub-district market, goat barns, mushroom farms, soy
plantations, and land reclamation/clearing, to name just a few initiatives. JMD scrambled to learn all it could about the
projects it was being “given,” and BBF supplied technical assistance and staff
training insofar as one small private foundation could adequately provide.
As JMD became more involved in
livestock, agriculture and health/sanitation projects in the province, it found
itself in the position of being able to accurately assess, with local partners,
the University, and government liaisons, the future needs of the region and the
projects that would be most successful.
In 2007 BRA, the governmental agency responsible for the reintegration
of conflict effected villages and ex- combatants, began to utilize JMD’s
knowledge, willingness to work with local officials, and basic fearlessness to
co-develop and initiate projects in remote and difficult to access areas that
had been forgotten by large aid agencies but were nevertheless home to
communities of hardworking and dedicated families eager to rebuild their lives
and to work together to do so.
At no time, however, did any of
JMD’s “benefactors” provide administrative, fiscal, or team building/agency
strengthening assistance or additional funding to insure that both the projects
and the small agency implementing it would be able to survive. Even after JMD became that rare entity—an NGO
registered in both Indonesia and Aceh
province—the funding it received was and will be always limited to direct
service, as if the international community believes that non-profit
administration, grants management, fiscal competence and national/international
marketing are already pre-programmed into the minds of every victim of natural
disaster and war.
Building
Bridges to the Future Foundation
July
15, 2012
