Culture Guides

Mini-guide by Suzie Capelli

In the light of the political correctness orgy which infected the world in the last decade of the twentieth centaury, the current trend is for more and more locals to be employed in NGOs. As citizens of developing nations they must, naturally, be trained in the ways of international development and productivity in general. And if they are not as productive as other international team players, well then allowances must be made.

Not expecting the same efficiency and effectiveness from locally recruited employees, in my opinion is some kind of perverse reverse racism. But you would be surprised at how much coddling goes on – in name of development. Private industry does not accept coddling. Neither does Hollywood!

My outspoken friend Nick (see section 1) worked as a production assistant on the set of a film being shot in Kigali. He had quite a lot of trouble working with some of other staff, notably the drivers. With typical lack of deference to political correctness, he asked a Rwandan production colleague:

“How come you are efficient and know your job, when lots of others here don’t”. She replied that on the last movie set there was no choice, you either did your job well or you got fired.

Appropriate training should be given but the point is that no one should be allowed to continue working in a substandard fashion because of their nationality.

More often than coddling, you notice a level of tolerance towards how the personal interests of local employees affect their on-the-job decisions. That said, there can be considerable pressure put on local NGO and INGO employees by friends, family or the community in general to use their influential position. But surely international organisations shouldn’t condone patronage?

Its known that the development industry pays well, internationally recruited workers have a lifestyle far in excess of what they could hope for in their home countries. The logic for this is the need to recruit and retain good people and to compensate them for not having home comforts (like electricity, sewage, water, privacy etc).

The trouble is, how do you pay locals working for international organisations? Surely it should be equal pay for equal work? But sometimes locals are not as well qualified or experienced and even when they are, international pay scales disturb the local job market. Who wants to be director of a local company when you could earn as much being a secretary for an international organisation? Who wants to be a civil servant when you can earn twice as much cleaning the house of an international worker?

This is a very sticky situation: you can’t pay the locals as much as the internationals, but if two people are working alongside each other doing the same job, how can their pay be radically different? In practise the INGOs tend to go for some middle ground but the result is that INGO employees get paid a hell of a lot more than locals in other industries. This breeds a situation where those working in INGOs and NGOs may not be entirely committed to their causes and are likely to see it as just another career path. Particularly in poor rural areas, NGO employers tend to be upper class elite.

On a last rather shocking point relating to NGOs and inefficiency, I have a friend who has been doing a Phd about NGOs. He told me he knew of an organisation in a rural area where the director received US$40,000 per year. That’s good wages even in the developed world, but not exactly shocking until you hear that organisations yearly disposable budget is US$10,000!

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