MIR MOSTAFIZUR RAHAMAN

A World Bank report on non-government organisations (NGO) of the country has expresses concern over the rapid growth and diversification of the NGO sector. The Bank in the report that was made public on Thursday, also stressed the need for ensuring accountability and transparency of the NGOs.

It also reveals that around 70 per cent of private charitable contributions in Bangladesh go to religious institutions, with educational establishments (15 per cent), a distant second followed by recreational events.

The World Bank report also observed that the advocacy activities of NGOs have become somewhat controversial.

"Most NGO advocacy focuses on issues affecting the poor, and is seen as fully legitimate (e.g. violence against women, dowry, land rights, access to justice, housing, education). However, recently a few NGOs were accused of stretching their advocacy work into partisan political activity and electioneering, and funding for their service delivery programmes was sequestered as a result. As Government funding for NGO services grows in importance, NGOs are less likely to want to antagonise Government," the report said.

Hence the more prominent advocacy-oriented NGOs tend to be involved only slightly in direct service activities, and large, multi-activity NGOs tend to avoid issues that could seriously antagonise government. Nevertheless even without taking on contentious issues such as human rights and electoral reform, there are plenty of low-key advocacy activities that multi-activity NGOs engage in that are of significant benefit to the poor (e.g. RDRS?s campaigns on violence against women and promoting access to resources by the poor).

However, the report noted that progress on a range of social indicators in Bangladesh over the last fifteen years has been striking in certain areas, and widely credited to the country?s pluralist service provision regime.

"Notable innovations that were expanded include delivering credit to the previously ?unbankable poor?, developing a non-formal education programme to cater to poor children, particularly girls, and the use of thousands of village-based community health workers providing doorstep services, in partnership with Government. The fact that poor women constitute a large proportion of NGO beneficiaries, despite the persistence of strong patriarchal norms, also testifies to institutional innovation," the report said.

Analysing the characters of country?s NGOs, the World Bank report said, the unique nature of Bangladesh?s NGOs is not confined to the delivery of social services and pro-poor advocacy. NGOs have developed commercial ventures in order to link poor producers with input and output markets as well as to develop a source of internally generated revenue, the report added.

There are an estimated 2000 or so development NGOs in Bangladesh and a small group are among the largest such organisations in the world. Most NGOs are small and have limited managerial and staff capacity. For instance in a sample of 720 NGOs, 90 per cent had programmes in less than five (out of 64) districts and only three NGOs had programmes in more than 200 (out of 507) sub-districts.

Relations of accountability between the main actors - poor service users, policymakers and service providers - ultimately determine the quality of services. In theory, service users may influence public service quality through their political power over policymakers, with NGOs helping by amplifying the voice of poor service-users through advocacy activities. "However when donors fund NGOs to directly provide services this may weaken mechanisms of accountability between policymakers and providers. The merits and drawbacks of different donor financing methods are assessed in this light. The increasing prominence of NGO services reflects their comparative advantage in bringing services directly to poor users. However it also highlights the need for a closer look at the conditions for accountability by NGOs to beneficiaries - conditions which cannot be taken for granted," the report said.

The report also commented that the analysis of NGO activities, their corporate governance and financing arrangements need to be considered in light of this more general framework of service provision in Bangladesh as a relative benchmark of NGO activities.

"Micro-credit now reaches as many as 37 per cent of all Bangladeshi households and around 60 per cent of poor households. The sector is dominated by the Grameen Bank, BRAC, ASA and Proshika, who between them lend to 76 per cent of all borrowers.