Women’s NGOs are changing the world – and not getting credit for it
In contemporary global
development circles, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are now performing
many more roles and activities than they did a few decades ago. NGOs work with
governments, community groups and the private sector — to develop and implement
programs, monitor and evaluate their progress and help train people working on
those projects.
They’re considered
more nimble than other institutions in accomplishing development goals, because
they can reach the most vulnerable or disaffected people in a community and
find innovative solutions to problems. Although their funding
streams and institutional decision-making structures are typically
multinational, NGOs’ legitimacy, indeed, often rests on perceptions of them
being “local” and “close to the people.”
NGOs are increasingly
taking on the responsibility of implementing the gender equality and women’s
empowerment agendas of the global development sector. But very rarely have
researchers tried to understand or document the specific challenges and
opportunities that NGOs working on gender equality, or those that define
themselves as feminist NGOs or women’s NGOs, face — when participating in
multiple-stakeholder projects like Canada’s
new feminist international assistance policy. The United Nations’
Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015, and the Canadian initiative
that includes $150 million in funding for advancing the rights of women and
girls, will undoubtedly increase the engagement of women’s NGOs in a variety of
activities.
That means
understanding the opportunities and constraints faced by women’s NGOs in
multiple-stakeholder projects is increasingly important. We’re basing our
observations upon research conducted over the past decade in India,
where women’s NGOs were involved in delivering urban basic services like water,
sanitation and electricity, and in Tanzania,
where women’s NGOs helped deliver community health and microenterprise
development services. In both contexts, we
found that women’s NGOs played crucial roles in development projects, often
mobilizing, organizing and building projects that otherwise would never have
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