Has the aid industry disempowered Tanzanian pastoralists?

Donors have flocked to support Tanzania’s pastoralist land rights movement. However, well-intentioned desires to promote democracy, indigenous rights, participatory development and community conservation have had perverse consequences. Leaders of pastoral non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have become less and less accountable to their communities. The pastoralist movement has lost momentum as its energies have been diverted into activities to please donors.

Research from the University of Colorado at Denver argues that donors overlook the impacts of their assistance on the formation of civil society in pastoralist communities. Lessons need to be learned as to why Tanzania’s pastoral movement has been transformed into groups of apolitical institutions geared toward the process of donor funding cycles.

Whilst Tanzania’s economic liberalisation meant a rise in foreign purchase of land which displaced entire communities of pastoralists, a simultaneous political liberalisation made it possible to register NGOs to mobilise people against the detrimental effects of economic liberalisation. Maasai leaders of the new NGOs worked hard at the grass­roots level to design and implement programmes to address long­standing problems of food insecurity, lack of medical services and gender oppression. With support from pastoral communities and donors, they began court battles to contest the legality of land seizures. For a while, hopes were high that the Tanzanian authorities would finally respect community land rights.

However, a rapid infusion of donor money has fundamentally transformed the movement. Under pressure to fund NGOs in advance of a viable NGO sector, donors have often set up NGOs and pressured them to rapidly implement quantifiable projects. Some even wrote the proposals for the projects they would fund. Donors preferred pouring money into vehicles, offices and high profile conferences and workshops rather than time-consuming activities requiring community consensus.

The research shows how:

• Donors in Tanzania naively see NGOs as inherently co-operative, efficient, empowering, participatory and transparent: they idealise the NGO as a ‘magic bullet’ sure to find its target no matter how poorly fired.
• Western notions of the inherent egalitarianism of Maasai society – and therefore by extension its NGOs – are romanticised.
• Tanzanian regulations forced NGOs to adopt bureaucratic trappings and elaborate hierarchies in order to get officially registered.
• Many Tanzanian NGO professionals see nothing wrong in misappropriation of aid money.
• NGO officials in their new Land Cruisers have become opportunistic liaison officers between western donors and pastoralist communities often pressuring local people to contribute to projects they do not want and briefing them how to behave during donor visits.

The researcher agues that donors need to:

• shed visions of pastoralist NGO leaders as traditional and altruistic leaders of worthy social movements and acknowledge that conflicts within NGOs are driven by money and power
• stop uncritically supporting NGO leaders who are disdainful of transparency and democratic practice
• recognise that a national land movement cannot be built without a sustained commitment to genuine community participation.

Africa’s NGO revolution, hailed by many as symptomatic of a flowering of grassroots democracy should be seen rather as an adaptation to conditions lain down by foreign donors. Clientelist accessing of new resources is consistent with Africa’s long history of colonialism and aid dependence. Communities have become commodities of an international NGO industry – when they should have been helped to become active participants in Tanzanian civil society.

Source(s):
‘Scaling up civil society: donor money, NGOs and the Pastoralist Land Rights Movement in Tanzania’ by Jim Igoe, Development and Change, vol 34, no 5, pp 863-885, 2003 Full document.

Funded by: Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and an Aspen Foundation grant for research on the Non-Profit sector.

id21 Research Highlight: 24 March 2004

Further Information:
Jim Igoe
Department of Anthropology
University of Colorado at Denver
CU-Denver
Campus Box 103
P.O. Box 173364
Denver, CO 80217-3364
USA

Tel: 1 303 556-3554
Fax: 1 303 556-8501
Contact the contributor: jigoe@carbon.cudenver.edu

University of Colorado at Denver, US

Other related links:
Non Governmental Organisations on trial in Bangladesh

'Beyond slogans: the state, non-governmental organisations and social welfare provision in China'

'Introduction to NGOs' - Key documents from the Global Policy Forum

'Learning lessons from land reform in Africa'