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Saturday, August 14, 2010

[ALOCHONA] The role of NGOs in Bangladesh



The role of NGOs in Bangladesh

It is evident that NGOs, too, have played crucial roles in integrating Bangladesh into the world capitalist system by way of facilitating the operations of multinational corporations on the one hand, and on the other, by way of managing to pacify social discontent and conflicts from time to time through short-term reform measures, while thus repeatedly obscuring the sites of actual material contradictions writes Melissa Hussain


ALTHOUGH the World Bank so far has constituted our discussion, it should be noted here that over the past four decades, Bangladesh has had plenty of 'development' projects and, ironically enough, accumulated a huge international debt for achieving this so-called development. During this particular process, of course, an immense number of consultancy firms, think tanks, and particularly non-governmental organisations emerged, contributing to the process of integrating Bangladesh into the world capitalist system.
   
I think I would do well to make some observations about the role of NGOs in Bangladesh, the role that has even somewhat marginalised the role of the state under certain circumstances. Several scholars have taken up this point. For instance, in her relatively recent essay 'Demystifying Micro-Credit: The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh', Lamia Karim talks about the marginal role of the state in Bangladesh, particularly in the rural areas: 'there is the virtual absence of the state in the rural economy. NGOs dominate the rural economy from rural credit to telecommunications to primary education' (12). Karim even goes to the extent of arguing that the dominant role played by NGOs in Bangladesh has led to a new state formation: 'the NGO sector in Bangladesh signals a new kind of state formation for the 21st century, one that is a cross between private capital and welfarism' (26). However, Karim does not talk about how the NGO sector is not only tied to private capital, but tied to international monopoly capital as well.
   
Now Bangladesh houses some of the largest NGOs in the world, such as the Grameen Bank. In his essay called 'Non-governmental Organizations and Civil Society in Bangladesh', Jerry Buckland makes certain observations about the growth of the NGO sector in Bangladesh. Buckland writes:
   From the mid-1970s, NGOs in Bangladesh experienced rapid growth, both in terms of numbers and size (Edwards and Hulme, 1992). Estimates of the number of NGOs in Bangladesh vary widely depending on how they are defined. Interestingly, one common way to quantify the number of specialized development NGOs is to determine the number receiving foreign funds, information available from the government's NGO Affairs Bureau. (152)
   But regardless of how they are defined, what do these NGOs do in Bangladesh? Buckland makes a few observations which I think are valid:
   
NGOs in Bangladesh have been active in community based development stressing accumulation of physical capital and technical change (through microcredit, agricultural promotion), social services (through non-formal education programmes highlighting literacy, life skills and political conscientisation), and community organizing (through conscientisation education and group capacity building). (152)
   Such activities might look attractive and even people-oriented in the first place. But, as I will show later in the case of the Grameen Bank in particular and also in the case of other NGOs, the NGO model has been considered ideal in certain cases by the international financial institutions themselves.
   
As Anu Muhammad points out in his essay 'Monga, Micro Credit and the Nobel Prize', the NGOs, despite their early beginnings marked by their apparent commitment to struggle against exploitation, increasingly became corporatised in such a way that they either directly or indirectly keep responding to the logics of capitalism. In fact, the concentration with which NGOs work in different pockets of the country prompts me to think of a version of 'micro-capitalism' as one that is germane to the NGOs operating in Bangladesh. Over a period of time, although the number of NGOs has massively increased, only a few big NGOs have hitherto become truly dominant in the country, monopolising a number of areas while mirroring the role of multinational corporations. Anu Muhammad explicitly points out,
   
Big NGOs are also in the process of forming alliances with multinational corporations. To give a few examples: BRAC work with UNOCAL and Monsanto; the Grameen Bank, the Bank in NGO model, initially intended to work with Monsanto but failed due to resistance, has now been intensely working with multinational telecommunication company. Recently it has started a project with Denom, the French food company. All in the name of 'poverty alleviation'! It is therefore not surprising to find Muhammad Yunus always advocating for the privatization of public institutions or services and liberalization of the economy in favour of global corporates. ("Monga, Micro Credit" par. 14)
   
Thus it is evident that NGOs, too, have played crucial roles in integrating Bangladesh into the world capitalist system by way of facilitating the operations of multinational corporations on the one hand, and on the other, by way of managing to pacify social discontent and conflicts from time to time through short-term reform measures, while thus repeatedly obscuring the sites of actual material contradictions. Indeed, one can safely assert that the NGOs in Bangladesh—given the continuing underdevelopment of the country—have never been interested in eradicating poverty as such, but only making it tolerable to the point that any social upheaval doesn't take place, while the poor themselves become dependent on aid, charity, credit, and other means without developing their political consciousness and enacting a revolutionary praxis against the entire system of domination that keeps them perpetually poor, or at least keeps poverty bearable, while only making changes here and there in their predicament through certain interventions, measures, and some reforms.
   
The feminist scholar Lamia Karim has even argued—in her essay 'Demystifying Micro-Credit: The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh'—that the NGOs have limited the imagination of the poor in the sense that all they can imagine at this point in terms of their economic freedom is loans. As Karim further argues, '[i]n the absence or a weakening of progressive social movements in many postcolonial countries, these NGOs are able to set themselves up as working with the "poorest of the poor", and install themselves as the progressive voice in rural society' (8). It is true that some of the NGOs have even used Paulo Freire, particularly his theory of conscientization! In the case of Bangladesh, it is a massive, even brutal irony that Paulo Freire has been pressed into the service of limiting the horizon of people's consciousness—people (particularly the constituencies of certain NGOs) don't seem interested in talking about fundamental changes in their predicament or movements, for that matter, but they seem interested in getting immediate financial assistance, particularly loans. In other words, by and large, NGOs in Bangladesh not only operate within, and even enhance, the capitalist political economy, but they also remain imbricated in a capitalist culture that promotes the subject-object relationship while depoliticizing the public consciousness in the interest of the accumulation of profit.
 
This de-politicisation itself is fundamentally a class phenomenon in Bangladesh, a phenomenon without which capitalism cannot reproduce itself in peripheral economic formations.
 

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