Ingrid Lewis
Globally, thousands of inclusive education projects are supported by a diverse range of donors and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Often, a national NGO implements the project with financial, technical and/or managerial input from a partner international NGO (INGO). Alternatively, national offices in low-income countries manage projects with head office supervision (usually from high-income countries). In this article I reflect on 25 years of working inside INGOs and as a consultant, focusing on the power dynamics that contradict a movement for inclusive education.
Power in NGOs
You may have seen or experienced inequality and ‘glass ceiling’ issues within a development NGO. For instance, senior management positions are dominated by men, or national staff are unable to secure senior international posts because of impossible international work experience requirements. There are also many hidden, unacknowledged power issues linked to entrenched behaviours that privilege some and disadvantage others.
Case story: I compiled the following case story to illustrate behaviours I have experienced. A donor invites an INGO to bid for a new education funding stream. There is a 6-week application deadline. The INGO staff at the head office review the donor’s information, check for alignment with their five-year strategic plan, prepare initial proposal ideas, and write instructions for their national partner in Country X. This takes two weeks.
Before submitting a proposal, the INGO staff must edit it and have it approved by two senior managers. They always allocate two weeks for this since head office staff are very busy. Unfortunately, one senior manager has annual leave booked, so they will need to approve the final proposal sooner. This means everything must be finished within 5 weeks. Using their agreed timeline, the INGO sends instructions to their national partner, giving them one week to provide detailed inputs for the proposal.
The national partner is running a workshop that week. Two staff withdraw from the workshop to help develop the proposal and a finance manager cancels her leave to help write the budget. Three other staff work late nights after the workshop and all weekend. A meeting with a Ministry of Education official regarding an existing project is postponed. During this week, the national partner’s office experiences four hours of power cuts daily.The national partner team is unhappy. They feel exhausted and complain to each other, but no one complains to the INGO. The team does not meet the deadline. They get an email from the INGO grant manager reminding them how important this proposal is, and that they must send their input immediately. The team submits their input a day late. Feedback from the INGO staff arrives 3 days later. It says the national partner did not send enough information and needs to provide more data by the next morning.
Your reflections
Is the case study an extreme story or something you have experienced? From which perspective have you experienced it? Reflect on the story. What power dynamics does it illustrate and how do they perpetuate inequality between different actors in development programmes? How might this undermine efforts to develop inclusive education programmes and systems? I explore some of my thoughts in the following table.
| In this story | What needs to change |
|---|---|
| A top donor sets unreasonable deadlines and no one challenges them. | Donors need realistic application processes, recognising the impact proposal development can have on NGOs. NGOs must stand up for their staff and partners against unreasonable deadlines. How can we move towards inclusive education if the funding process exhausts and demoralises the implementers? |
| An INGO team recognises their own busy-ness but forgets that national partner teams are also busy. | Everyone is busy. If a timeline is fixed, consider changing the tasks (can the proposal be redefined or reduced?) or split the burden more fairly (can the international team do the background research?). |
| The national partner team carries the burden of condensing the timeline. | Workloads may be affected when a colleague is on leave. Any extra burden needs to be shared fairly, and through consultation. |
| The national partner team feels unable to complain to the INGO team about unreasonable expectations and their impact on existing work and staff wellbeing. | Everyone should have an equal voice. If we are working on inclusive education, we need to live and breathe inclusivity. That includes empowering everyone to say “stop, this task/timeline is not viable and it’s going to hurt us or interrupt existing work”. Such messages must be taken seriously and never interpreted as excuses. |
| The INGO team is unaware of, or doesn’t appreciate the value of, the ongoing work that is being interrupted by this proposal process. | Existing work is often interrupted by the pressure to research and write the next big proposal. The proposal-winning process often seems more important than the subsequent project implementation. We need to address this and make sure donors recognise their role in this problem. |
| The INGO team seems not to recognise or respect the challenging circumstances in which their national partner works. | Maybe the INGO team genuinely does not understand or has not experienced the difficulty of working in the national context, with regular power cuts. Maybe they assume the national team is used to these conditions and should be able to “get on with it”. Either way, greater empathy and respect are needed. |
What can we do?
The situation will never change if we just accept the status quo! In an inclusive classroom we empower learners to tell their teachers what they need to do to improve practice and outcomes. So why not…
- Speak to donors when they issue unrealistic calls for proposals.
- Explain how unreasonable deadlines impact proposal development, project implementation and worker wellbeing.
- List your expectations for managers, head offices, INGO partners and donors. Be inspired by the learners in an inclusive class who prepare ‘rules for our teacher’.
- Work together to challenge donors and/or INGO partners who are not meeting your expectations.
It is difficult to make that first step to question the status quo, but it is needed if we are to move towards an inclusive system that promotes inclusive education.
Ingrid is the Managing Director of the Enabling Education Network. She can be contacted at info@eenet.org.uk.