NO DOUBT today, Sunday prayers across the world will be said for the people of Haiti. The most recent estimates coming out of the Haitian government is that some 140,000 people have lost their lives in the earthquake which devastated Port-au-Prince and its environs last week.

I’ve been following CNN’s coverage of the event, and one of the crucial things I’ve noted is that CNN has chosen to publish a list of legitimate aid organisations online, including the UN agencies, Red Cross, CARE, and Oxfam among others. Unfortunately, the list seems restricted to non-governmental organisations with offices within the United States, or rather, the US arm of these NGOs specifically.

Arguably, the reason that at an internationally respected news agency is essentially only willing to vouch for the credibility of a few dozen out of what must be thousands of agencies that are on the surface capable of getting aid to Haiti is indicative of the mistrust for what is surely a majority of NGOs, at the very least in the aid delivery sector. Indeed, CNN anchors spend a significant portion of the coverage of the Haiti’s disaster warning about entrusting money to organisations that are not verifiably above board.

Charity, whether in the traditional sense or in the complex and multi-faceted ways that exist today, has always had an attendant cloud of suspicion hanging over it. These are often for good reason, too, especially since the cases of the misappropriation of funds or material intended for the betterment of the underprivileged are often misused. Guyana is no stranger to this phenomenon.

This country has a vibrant and growing NGO sector, cutting across a number of areas, including health, community development, individual capacity-building, sports, and poverty alleviation. As I wrote in an article on NGOs a little over a year ago, “donor agencies often find it convenient to use NGOs as a conduit for delivery of their particular mandate, via the provision of financial and/or technical support. This is a phenomenon that has grown exponentially within recent years, and with increased cash flow, today’s largest NGOs have asset bases and control capital equivalent to, and sometimes superior than, many medium-sized, commercial enterprises agencies in the developing world. In, addition to some NGOs providing services that possess a commercial element, it is also clear that many NGOs have been created to access the funds already available in that sector, and not necessarily to fill a need in a particular sector; there are some which have significantly shifted their original mandate to access those resources.”

The article referred to in the previous paragraph did not deal with the issue of accountability, and the attendant issue of transparency, something I will remedy herein. Before I go further, I would like to state that the majority of NGOs in Guyana play an important role, either within the community or within their specific sub-sector at a national level. That said, frankly speaking, there are little or no monitoring mechanisms relating to NGOs in Guyana. The legislation governing them, the Friendly Societies Act, is not only outdated, but inadequate, and the mechanism by which they are supposed to be monitored – the registrar of friendly societies – is incapable, from a resource allocation basis, to effectively monitor the hundreds of non-governmental organisations in operation in Guyana today.

Related to all this is, of course, the issue of governance. Sadly, it appears that the phrase ‘non-governmental’ in the term NGO somehow implies that no governance is necessary within many of these organisations. There is no other way to put this but bluntly. Too many NGOs operating in Guyana today are the personal fiefdoms of people at the head, with absolutely no mechanism for democratic input from the membership, or the people that amount to their constituency. How many NGOs regularly hold elections of office bearers? How many of them have built-in term limits in their constitutions, and how many of those that do adhere to those term limits? How many NGOs operating locally still have the same person or persons heading them, who were heading them five years ago, or at the time of founding?

This combination of poor standards of accountability, inadequate transparency, and practically non-existent internal governance mechanisms is as desirable within the NGO sector as it is in government. While focus on these issues, and the related issue of corruption, are necessary when examining the public sector, they are equally important in dealing with the private sector and civil society. In the upcoming weeks, I will be expanding on these issues in a more comprehensive manner, and I welcome input from all quarters, including, of course, the NGOs themselves.

In closing, I’d like to return to the disaster in Haiti. I know it’s hard to find a silver lining behind the present cloud that overshadows that country, but I believe that one positive emanating from this situation is a precedent which will be set for the delivery of aid in a more direct fashion to the citizens of that country than has obtained before. I am proud, overwhelmed even, by Guyana’s response to the international call for aid. It has constantly been my position, expressed several times in this column, that there are certain things which warrant our rising above our partisan politics; this is a case in which we have done splendidly……SO FAR.