Date: 14/04/2023

Relevance: GS-2: Development Processes and the Development Industry — the Role of NGOs, SHGs, various groups and associations, donors, charities, institutional and other stakeholders.

Key Phrases: Civil Society organizations, Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Community-based organizations (CBOs), Citizen-centric Governance, 2nd Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC), Capacity Building.

Context:

• In India, most donors’ horizons of time and their roles have narrowed over the past two-three decades, with some notable exceptions.
  • This has had a multiplicative weakening effect on Indian civil society because the CSO landscape is profoundly shaped by what donors do or don’t do.

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs):

• It includes non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs) and other kinds of not-for-profit organizations working for societal improvement and helping the vulnerable.
• CSOs represent a wide range of interests and ties.
• Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) are organized voluntary non-state institutions which mostly operate on a non-profit basis.
• Most CSOs participate in two kinds of work.
  • First, to build and run institutions that serve a community in some way; for example, orphanages or shelters for the homeless, institutions that support women’s collectives, and (commonly seen) health centres and schools for those in poverty.
  • Second, interventions to improve something in communities; for example, livelihoods of small farmers, environmental sustainability, access to entitlements such as ration cards or livelihood from forests, and the functioning of rural panchayats.

Issues with the CSOs:

• Inadequate Support for the Overheads of CSOs
  • Most donors expect a strong, vibrant and high-capacity CSO ecosystem.
    • However, reluctance to support the activities and functions that ensure stability and organizational effectiveness is inconsistent with that expectation.
    • Donors want to support costs which are incurred for programmes and activities that directly deliver the desired benefits or improvements to intended communities.
    • They don’t want to, or want to minimize, their support for the other costs that CSOs would be incurring—classified loosely as ‘overheads’.
• Reluctance to commit Long-term Funding
  • Three decades ago, many donors would readily consider giving CSOs corpus grants or long-term grants of 7-10 years duration.
    • But today many CSR donors are giving 1-year grants, while 3-year grants are usual across different kinds of donors.
  • Longer duration grants are exceptions, with only a few philanthropic foundations committed to these.

Negative Impacts on the Working of CSOs:

• Inadequate Overheads Funding
  • No organization can run without taking care of overheads appropriately.
  • Almost all donors do support such ‘overheads’, though too many do so grudgingly and insufficiently.
  • The unreal push towards strong CSOs with no overheads is one manifestation of this funding narrowing.
• Reluctance for Long-term Funding
  • Short-term funding from donors is at odds with both kinds of work.
  • Institutional kinds of work need continual financial support—as long as the community needs the help provided.
    • Therefore, Institutions will have to continue to run and do their work to support communities.
  • The intervention kind of work usually takes 5 years, and often 7, to make any notable difference even at the modest scale of a few villages or urban communities.
    • There are many reasons for this, including the time taken to mobilize a CSO team with adequate capacity, gain the trust of communities, develop a shared understanding of the specifics and complexity of the issue to be taken up, enable the first few changes, tackle inevitable resistance, spread those changes, sustain them through cycles of disillusionment and failure, and more.
    • Changes in human behaviour and communities are very slow processes that are neither predictable nor bereft of unintended consequences and complications.
    • Even in the intervention kind of work, unless institutional support for changes in the community is retained, over time the improvements can be washed away or diluted by other forces at work.
    • It is sufficient to note that short-term grant commitments from donors to CSOs are at odds with the fundamental nature of their work.
  • At its core, it leads to significant uncertainty.
• This uncertainty affects the work directly, since it has an impact on the stability of the teams on the ground, the approach and design of the work, the activities undertaken, and so on the quality of work.
• The leadership of the organization scrambles to raise funds instead of focusing on real work; often more than half the leadership’s time is spent on fundraising.
  • Even more insidiously, these shorter time frames push CSOs to often focus on what they can ‘show’ in that period to the donor, rather than what is actually required.
  • Cumulatively this kind of short-termism has been weakening CSOs and pushing their work towards the superficial and shallow.

Way Forward:

• All donors need and demand to see the progress of work and its quality, and then extend funds on that basis.
  • This is entirely justified but the same can be achieved by committing long-term funds, for say 7 years, with the completely reasonable expectation that such financial support is contingent on satisfactory progress.
  • In practice, this may not be difficult for many donors because they usually renew their grants after the initial funding period.
  • Such a shift by a large number of donors will have a deep impact on the CSO ecosystem—on the quality of work, because it will then be designed and executed with realistic time-frames, enabling work that is truly required, and also on the quality of organizations, making them stronger and helping them develop greater capacity.

Conclusion:

• Civil society organizations (CSOs) play a significant role in the social, economic, and democratic development of the country.

Source: Live-Mint

Mains Question:

Q. “Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) landscape is profoundly shaped by what donors do or don’t do”. Examine the statement. Also, suggest some measures to improve the working and effectiveness of the CSOs. (150 Words).