ACORD GOES NATIVE

INTRODUCTION

In March/April this year 2003, Acord embarked on a historic venture, never undertaken by an established NGO in a rich country before, the transfer of its HQ to Nairobi, Kenya and senior management to Africans. David has been steering the organisation through the past few years and will be handing over in July to his successor, Kamal Singh.

Aid flows to Africa are the dominant form of capital transfers to the continent, accounting for two thirds of total aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) capital flows to the continent. The management of aid programmes is primarily through NGOs, a major force in the daily lives of hundreds of millions of peoples on the continent. NGOs based in rich countries dominate the policy making and management of most programmes, often through their local offices and/or with assistance from local NGOs. This transfer is therefore a major change from the current model, and will be closely watched by observers.

Acord was established in 1976 and currently, has a turnover of about £8 millions, operating only in Africa.

RECENT MOVE

1.1 J Boima Rogers (JBR) Twenty-seven years after Acord was established you have decided to move the HQ to Nairobi, Kenya in the region you specialise in, what exactly is involved in this move?

David Waller (DW) Well almost everything in the sense that it involves a lot of new staff as a lot of staff (in the London office) do not want or are not able to relocate. There are a lot of institutional memories that have to be captured so you don’t make mistakes, like how you do a financial year and that sort of stuff. You also have to look at relationships and all logistical side of things. So we started off with one department last year and found it quite difficult and we are trying to learn from that experience this year. We are trying to do it slightly more systematically and better but it’s quite a difficult operation.

1.2 JBR Acord may have moved its HQ but funding will still be from rich countries, what efforts are being made to increase funding from local sources, partly from the symbolism that Africans and organisations based on the continent own Acord in that respect but also to ensure that local priorities are reflected in Acord’s programmes?

DW The funding situation is complicated in that increasingly northern donors are decentralising some of their decision making about funds so that an increasing proportion of our funding is what we call local, that is raised in the country but most of that is still actually from the north, it is just coming from the local office. The only complication is that many donors, with good reason, are putting more of their funding through sector-wide approach or budget support direct to governments so that increasingly governments in Africa hold the purse strings and NGOs need to work with them. There are some very positive aspects to that, it increases the power of governments in Africa but it also means that civil society relative to the host government is getting more dependent (on the government) and in difficult situations that can create problems.

1.3 JBR Acord’s stated objectives are improving civil society, helping resolve conflict, overcoming discrimination, improving livelihoods and addressing issues on the HIV/Aids pandemic, a pretty broad remit, how will the move realise these objectives? In particular, how will the move affect the key actions such as: research, support to local organisations, mobilising resources, influencing relevant policies, practices and attitudes, working in alliance with others and working across national boundaries?

DW Acord has always been involved with research; its title actually means Agency for Cooperation, Research and Development so we’ve always been involved in that. The issue really facing us is why we are doing these projects, why are we doing research and what is the change we want to bring. What we are seeing is that whatever our work, whether it is livelihoods or aids or gender and however we are doing it, we’re trying to address what we call ‘social action’ in other words people working together to bring about a more just society for those in Africa. This will be part of our work. And indeed part of how we manage ourselves as an organisation so that research on all these things you have listed here, supporting local organisations, fundraising, advocacy, working in alliance with others, working across boundaries they are all related to bringing about change, that’s the core objective that runs through what we do. We do practical work that is very important to people who are on the margins and in very dire material situations of poverty but we also address these more strategic issues of research advocacy so it is getting the synergy of doing those things together rather than doing them as separate projects.

1.4 JBR How exactly would your move improve on you are currently doing?

DW Some of it is being closer to the action and developing capacity in Africa for doing these things. In the past our research work tended to be done more in the UK and there is always a danger of that feeding into a paradigm that says that the thinkers and people with the knowledge are in the North and the doers are in Africa and so we hope to work with African research institutes, develop the capacity of our African staff to provide leadership in this area. This should all be helped by being closer to the action in Nairobi. It won’t by itself be sufficient but our hope is it will enable it to happen more easily.

1.5 JBR Do you see other NGOs in rich countries following suit?

DW Well most NGO’s are institutions in their country of origins as they have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of volunteers working for them perhaps in their shops, they have thousands of people giving direct subscriptions and they are more institutionally rooted in the North and that puts them in a slightly different position. Acord has always received its funding since its creation as a consortium from other agencies which means that we are not institutionally rooted, infact we started life in Geneva and moved to Amsterdam then London 20 years ago and now to Nairobi, so we have a flexibility to move which other agencies don’t have, having said that I think other agencies are considering it but I think it will be slightly different for them, but I think the question is being asked and addressed in slightly different ways

SALIENT AFRICAN ISSUES AND GLOBALISATION

2.1 JBR Aid flows form two thirds of capital flows into Sub-Saharan Africa, the second highest proportion of aid/private capital flows for all regions in the world. Is Africa getting its fair share or is aid part of the continent’s problem?

DW Big issue – funding is part of the issue but also capacity of governments is another part of the problem. I think the major problem is that within the context of globalisation African governments are fairly powerless on the global scene and they are constrained by an interlocking set of rules around aid, trade, debt, government policies and increasingly in the war against terrorism which is like a new cold war whereby people are divided into goodies and baddies on whether they support the war against terrorism or not. All these rules are interlocking and used together. I think Africa is getting an extremely bad deal, with the North saying we should apply these rules and then Europe and America ignoring those rules exactly when it suits them as in foreign subsidies in particular. Aid is a fig leaf which allows the West to think it is doing something which infact if it just dealt with the trade subsidization and gave Africa a fair shake on that the value would be a lot greater than any of the aid it is providing.

2.2 JBR The last two decades of the 20^th century saw the emergence of NGOs as a major force, in some cases the dominant force in development in Africa, the most active of these are based in rich countries, taking over roles normally performed by governments, a scenario that has been described as neo-colonisation in different clothing, do you subscribe to that view?

DW Yes I think there is a rather frightening parallel between the language of colonialism, which was around civilising and the language of NGO’s around modernising and around development. I think it comes out in a mindset that you see in debates in the North with a presumption that we in the North have the solution and that we can provide that solution to Africa. I think that what has to change is greater respect, a presumption of equality in the debates so that solutions are not presumed to come from the North. Having said that I don’t think also that the alternative extreme of saying that the solutions can only come from Africa is valid. I think that there needs to be a fair exchange of ideas and bad ideas need to be rejected and good ideas need to be endorsed. There is no monopoly of good ideas from one place to another. It is going to need everybody’s good ideas to solve the problems.

2.3 JBR Now that many countries in Africa are committed to good governance, enshrined in NEPAD, should rich countries not be transferring resources to governments so that they can actually implement policies and build on such experience within the new framework?

DW NEPAD is a process. It had a difficult start in that it’s origins were contested and it wasn’t terribly participative and even now it is not widely known and translated across the continent but like the PRSPs they are not necessarily going to go away and they are dynamics we should be engaged in. Greater funding should be part of the equation as has been promised but it also needs to be used well. But how do you avoid the destructive side of conditionalities while also not just putting money into some regimes that are struggling for legitimacy.

But what you don’t have to do is to swing from one extreme to the other; NGO’s were the flavour of the month in the 1980s and 90s. There is a danger now that it swings to the other extreme that the only legitimacy is governments. I think you need both, governments, including our own need to be held to account by civil society but governments have a legitimacy that NGOs do not so you need both of them. The great danger is that you have fashions in aid that are swinging from one to the other

2.4 JBR What are your views about the effect of globalisation on the continent and what can stakeholders do to minimize the negative effects and enhance the positive effects of this phenomenon?

DW Well there has been a tendency of NGOs in the past as part of marketing themselves as having the solution to problems relating to the dynamics of globalisation. There is no one institution that has the power to deal with that, when you see that even European countries are ignored and tossed aside you can see how weak African governments are going to be if the West really decides it is against them. I think the only way that is to work together with people and organisations that share interests, that is, alliances with social movements, African governments, northern rich countries and donors. An alliance of values not just an alliance of contract based on aid flows. An alliance based on what we are trying to achieve and goals that reflects shared values. Building such alliances and movements may be largely unproven but we feel there is no alternative.

2.5 JBR What is Acord doing to shape the debate and in effecting its policies on globalisation?

DW Last year we brought together our staff and some of our partners to look at the effect of globalisation on Africa. Staff who have been for many years involved in the frontline of addressing poverty in marginalized areas but who hadn’t had the opportunity to explore how the situation they were dealing with relate to broader global dynamics. What came out very powerfully was an understanding of how even in the most isolated places of Africa the effects globalisation are very real and very apparent. Peasant farmers, two days drive from Kisagini (in Democratic Republic of Congo) are very aware of the relationship between their lack of income from agriculture and the massive subsidies that are being given to farmers in Europe and America. So first of all it is getting that policy literacy, to understand the context we are working in and engaging in debate with other agencies we are working with. We then had a series of on-going debates around some of these emerging issues on how you work in alliance with people. I am not sure people actually know how to do it terribly well. We know how to run our own legal entities but how do you get legal entities to pool some of their sovereignty, pool some of their resources and power beyond their own organisational boundaries. It’s a tough issue and one that we are still working on and we are leading the debate in some of the countries amongst our staff and with partners that are challenging themselves and ourselves on how we take forward that policy. I am getting interesting responses and getting very positive feedback from a range of agencies that yes indeed, this is the debate that needs to be taking place and an issue that we need to be exploring.

2.6 JBR Although Acord is obviously preoccupied with marginalized sections of society who do not have the means or opportunity to function adequately in the private sector, all emerging markets have seen a shift in capital flows from aid to private flows, do you see that happening in Africa and how can governments enhance this engine of growth?

DW Africa, like many areas went through a period of very rapid history after independency, including some fairly horrific incidences of being shafted by the international community and as a result some countries then experimented with very centralised economic planning and some of that still has not really gone from countries. One of the major things that has to happen is allowing some rules to be slightly relaxed at a local level for example, access to credit to be made less bureaucratic. At local level it is not lack of resources, it is rules that impede people from having access to resources that are available. There is a tendency for governments to control more than is necessary. Some of that may be because there are so few areas that they can control that the areas they can they want to deal with that so I think. Africans are very capable capitalists in very difficult situations and one of these avenues is allowing that survival spirit, encouraging it, giving it more fertile soil to operate in. Regulating it so that you don’t have bandit capitalism, you don’t privatise the land only to make the rich richer. It has to be done in a way that promotes social justice.

2.7 JBR But how do you actually get people to come to Africa to invest, if you look at total FDI in 2000, Africa received only 1% whereas it has 12% of the world’s population? How do you get people to bring money into the continent and money that stays there for some time?

DW I think the danger is that Africa has opened itself to be raped by the capital that is coming in where investors are looking for 20% returns and are not looking for sustainable commitments. What people need is not incentives but things such as peace and stability, a stable regime that investors can work with. There is no point in putting in massive tax incentives but where the situation is still unstable. The capitalist money will still only come in for very short-term investments. The problem is most of the 1% (of total FDI in the world) is for crude oil, diamonds and other extractive materials and the terms of trade on which Africa is trading in those are not very good and benefiting as many people as they should. The great danger is that the countries that are doing worst are those with the greatest resources such as Nigeria and Congo, where the battle for those resources is part of the problem. I think Africa has to be careful not to see FDI as a holy grail to its problems. It may be the product/outcome of a more stable situation but it has to be dealt with internally rather than seeing a solution coming from outside.

2.8 JBR After the Iraqi war, with Pax Americana firmly established, what should Africa expect and strive for in this Uni-polar world?

DW Africans are starting to recognise that if they are going to wait for the rest of the world to solve their problems they will have a very long wait and be very disappointed. There is a new generation of African leaders taking that responsibility, saying we have got to decide what to do and what is important to us. I think that is a very encouraging sign, I think if that dynamic can be supported so that there is a degree of collective focus then Africa could substantially increase its power even in this uni-polar world. The world does need Africa’s resources, an amazing treasure trove of resources and if it was able to act in unison, the last 20-30 years of decline in resource prices could have been challenged. It needs to be challenged if Africa is going to turn things round.

ABOUT YOURSELF

3.1 JBR Why after building such an impressive organisation did you abdicate your position?

DW I am not sure it is a case of abdicating, it is more a question of stages and profile. My role was to help with the change management of the organisation and I think the core of the changes we have just about seen through. What is needed now is somebody who is much better networked and can take forward the whole aspect of working in alliance with others. I am very pleased to say that my successor, Kamal Singh, who is South African, is extremely well connected with a wide range of networks and alliances around Africa and internationally. It is really exciting handing over to somebody who is simply more appropriate for the next phase so I think it is a natural progression of having come in to do a particular job, and having a new person to do the next phase.

3.2 JBR I understand that you are still playing a part in the organisation, what do you do for Acord now and how long do you intend to carry on in this role?

DW I am still a Director till the end of June and then will see what happens, whether I take on any role after that. Certainly I will be providing moral support even though I am not working there full time.

3.3 JBR Obviously you are very young to be calling it a day so what is your next venture?

DW No idea, I am too busy with this change. I will take a couple of months off and then decide after that