Сабина Садиева

Since last year, the European Commission has been hammering out a new directive on “transparency of interest representation carried out on behalf of third countries,” which explicitly includes NGOs as the carriers of such “interest representation.” The United Kingdom and Canada have similar draft bills in the works. Famously in the United States, a law obliging representatives of foreign interests to register has been on the books since 1938: the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Concurrently, the institution of NGOs underwent a dramatic transformation, more rapidly and profoundly in developing countries and especially the former Soviet Union than in the West. […] The NGOs that Western governments finance with their development aid budgets look nothing like this, but more like start-ups run by social entrepreneurs. Instead of members and volunteers, they have bosses and employees organized in strict hierarchies, and hard borders separate those who build lucrative careers managing NGOs from those who benefit from their assistance.

Money and power are inseparably connected, and money flowing from powerful interest groups therefore needs to be publicized, thoroughly scrutinized, and regulated. We know this. But we do not apply this knowledge when we funnel our money into the NGOs and political systems of the Global South.

Without foreign grant funding, the majority of NGOs in the Global South would not exist at all. Some groups and movements might have taken radically different forms had such funding not been available. They would have had to rely far more on support from their own population and on the latter’s volunteering and donations, and therefore would have had to listen far more to their fellow citizens and center their concerns in their missions. Or to win the public over to their causes, they would have had to explain their ideas and their work far better. Probably both. Without foreign financing, the NGO sector would have never generated a high-earning, aloof upper class, similar to that of investment bankers and management consultants in the West.