World View : Thinking Locally Spreads Globally : An estimated 500,000 'NGOs' provide services and fight for causes as government aid dwindles.

By STANLEY MEISLER

June 13, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

UNITED NATIONS —

Just before Hillary Rodham Clinton toured Bangladesh in March, 2,000 extremist Muslims marched in the streets of Dhaka, the capital, not to protest the visit of the First Lady but to demonstrate against most of the development projects on her itinerary.

They were upset that she was honoring the work of grass-roots organizations led by women.

On the two-week trip through South Asia, Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, seemed enthralled by the work of impoverished Asian women organizing themselves into small groups to protect their interests and initiate projects that would improve their woeful incomes.

The Muslim protesters were infuriated by her attention to these humble but revolutionary groups. The men believe that the organizations have lured women away from their traditional homemaking roles in many Islamic societies, including Bangladesh.

“We shall wave torn shoes at her if she tries to promote the non-governmental organizations,” threatened Muslim leader Faisal Hug Amini as the First Lady’s visit loomed. Showing a shoe is a deep insult in many Asian cultures.

The torn shoes and Clinton’s tour reflected one of the most extraordinary yet little noted social and political phenomena of the past two decades--the global proliferation of ordinary women and men organizing to better themselves.

These grass-roots groups provide services, lobby for causes or try to do both. Some organize to build better homes, market crops, improve health, ensure water supplies, provide day care for children, help the poor and implement a host of other community development projects.

Other groups organize to fight for the environment, human rights, population control and a host of other causes.

The private associations are known worldwide by a legalistic mouthful of a name--non-governmental organizations--and its awkward acronym, NGOs. There is no doubt of their new strength and ubiquity. Some authorities estimate that there are now at least 500,000 NGOs in the world.

Some are as large and well known as the Red Cross or Greenpeace or CARE, others as small as the grass-roots groups visited by Hillary Clinton in Bangladesh.

Many specialists believe that all contribute to the strength of what is known as the “civil society”--the independent institutions outside government that help people interact with government and make their will known to officials and politicians.

Developing a civil society, working from the bottom up, is an essential element of democracy, political scientists say.

For this reason, the mushrooming of NGOs is usually regarded as positive, especially in the Third World.

In Ahmadabad, India, for example, Hillary Clinton visited a bank run by the local chapter of the Self-Employed Women’s Assn. of India that issues loans as small as a few dollars to poor women so they can buy a cow or a plow and better themselves. Regular banks would ignore them.

Governments are not always sure what to make of NGOs. In Egypt, according to Saad el din Ibrahim, chairman of the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies in Cairo, “The government is of two minds about all of these things. In one sense, the government is content that these NGOs, or some of them at least, are picking up the slack, providing services that the government has been forced to cut. On the other hand, it is jealous of their growing autonomy.”

The Egyptian government has harassed some NGOs, including the Ibn Khaldoun Center. But Saad, whose center wants to encourage NGOs and strengthen the civil society in Egypt, said: “We are prepared to go through peaceful confrontation with authorities so long as we have a fighting chance. The NGOs should not have the idea that it is a picnic. Having a strong NGO is a struggle, especially in the Third World.”

In Peru, budget cutting has prompted NGOs to take over services once provided by government, and the government appears disturbed by the funding of these NGOs by foreign organizations.

“This government’s reaction is: All this money is coming, and we have no part in it,” said Kris Merschrod, the director in Peru of PACT, a U.S. NGO that encourages the growth of NGOs in the Third World. “Governments are weakest in the delivery of social services. But when NGOs do it, the governments feel a loss of political prestige.”

Not all NGOs clearly strengthen democracy. The Michigan Militia, which does not call itself an NGO but could qualify under a broad definition, will probably be investigated by the U.S. Congress soon to determine whether its goals are a danger to society.

“The Michigan Militia is certainly an NGO,” said Peter Dobkin Hall of the Yale University Program on Non-Profit Organizations. “They fit into one of the categories of NGOs. Being a voluntary organization doesn’t mean that it has to do positive things. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, is a voluntary organization.”

Voluntary organizations or voluntary associations are terms that scholars sometimes use to describe NGOs.

U.S. Acts as Model

Many experts believe that the whole concept of non-governmental organizations is a U.S. idea that has spread worldwide. When the young French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in 1831 and 1832, he was astounded by the number of private associations of many kinds--”religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.”

“The Americans make associations,” he wrote in his classic “Democracy in America,” “to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the Antipodes; they found in this manner hospitals, prisons, or schools. If it be proposed to inculcate some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.”

Tocqueville regarded this affinity for associations--evident in no other country in the early 19th Century--as a reflection of the strength of U.S. democracy.

“The United States went a different route than Europe in creating the American welfare state,” said Hall of Yale University. “American policy-makers used the tax system and direct subsidy as a way of delivering services. When they wanted to improve the health care system, for example, they passed a Hill-Burton Act [in 1946] which made funds available for private hospital expansion. The United States has created a welfare state through nonprofit organizations, the vast majority created since 1950.”

Associations fighting for a cause and private organizations providing services with the help of government money are strongly American.

Hall, however, cautioned against thinking of them as an American monopoly.

“I don’t think they have been as important anywhere in the world as they are here in the United States,” he said, “but I don’t think they have been absent elsewhere in the world--even though De Tocqueville says differently.”

Whichever, the U.S. model is the envy of outsiders.

“I have begun to appreciate the NGOs here,” said a European diplomat assigned to the United Nations in New York. “They are very important. And they are courageous. They say things that governments cannot say.”

Evidence of the proliferation of NGOs mounts all the time. In Egypt, according to Saad, the numbers of NGOs registered with the government doubled to 20,000 in the last 10 years. Julie Fisher of the Yale University Program on Non-Profit Organizations estimates that the number of grass-roots women’s groups in Kenya increased from 4,250 in 1980 to 16,000 in 1984 to 20,000 in 1990.

In Mexico, the influence of the NGOs was demonstrated last year when 400 joined together to form a Civic Alliance that monitored the August presidential elections, now regarded as the fairest in Mexican history. Armed with some technical help from U.N. agencies, the Civic Alliance provided 12,000 observers at 7,000 polling stations and issued independent voting counts of its own.

A century and a half after Tocqueville, said Lester M. Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Policy Studies, “a veritable associational revolution seems to be under way at the global level.”

Reasons for Spread

Specialists offer a myriad of reasons for the revolution. At a recent meeting in Washington, overseas staffers for Private Agencies Collaborating Together, or PACT, discussed the reasons for the mushrooming growth of these grass-roots groups.

PACT, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or AID, is an American NGO that helps NGOs organize and develop throughout the Third World.

Two reasons were mentioned most often:

* Third World governments do not have the will or the resources to provide many services these days. The problem has been exacerbated by the demands of donor nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that these governments reduce bureaucracies and cut budget deficits to qualify for aid. NGOs try to fill the gaps.

* Foreign aid donors tend to prefer placing their money with NGOs rather than governments, a preference that naturally encourages the formation of these grass-roots groups. Donors prefer this route because they look on NGOs as efficient and as a force for democracy. Sometimes the preference comes from a political twist: When whites ruled South Africa, for example, the United States turned its back on the government and put its aid money in the hands of NGOs organized by blacks.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the World Bank estimated that 8% of its loans covered Third World projects with some NGO involvement; now, 50% of its loans involve NGO projects.

In March, Vice President Al Gore told the U.N. World Social Summit in Copenhagen that the Clinton Administration had increased the percentage of its foreign aid delivered through private groups from 17% to 30% and planned to move it up to 40% within five years.

Yale’s Julie Fisher adds a third reason for the growth in associations. She says that since the 1970s, many Third World university graduates, no longer able to find government jobs and unwilling to emigrate to another country, remained at home and organized or joined NGOs.

Other specialists say the the massive U.N. world conferences on environment, women, population, human rights and children in recent years have inspired delegates and observers to return home and create associations to fight for the goals set by the conferences. This can cause conflict.

Beijing’s Dilemma

Some governments abhor an active civil society. This attitude has already set off a furor over the U.N. International Women’s Conference scheduled for Beijing this September.

U.N. conferences always have a parallel, semi-official NGO forum going on at the same time. These forums often apply pressure on the official conference. In fact, under U.N. rules, some NGOs are granted observer status at the official conference and shuttle back and forth between the conference and the forum.

The Chinese government evidently did not realize what it was allowing into its tent by promising to host the conference and forum.

But the reality gradually dawned on the Chinese that they would have to host thousands of women assembling in Beijing as a pressure group--perhaps demanding freedom for Tibet or condemning China’s abortion policies or lobbying about other embarrassing issues.

The Chinese government has not been hospitable to a civil society. When an NGO emerges, like the Democracy Wall Movement in 1989, it is usually a dissident group and quickly suppressed.

A few months ago, Beijing announced that it would move the NGO forum out of town--an hour’s drive from the official women’s conference even under police escort. It was an obvious attempt to keep the NGO women away from the official conference. The Chinese evidently did not expect a fuss, but they got one.

The leaders of the NGO Forum at first rejected the out-of-town facilities and demanded that Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali come to their aid.

Feeling the pressure from governments that already had felt the pressure from their own women’s associations, the U.N. chief dispatched a trouble-shooter, Ismat Kittani, to try to work out a solution.

Kittani came up with a compromise that the women accepted. They would hold their forum at the distant site, but only after the Chinese government promised to grant visas to as many as 36,000 women, install 3,500 international telephone lines, provide improved transport to Beijing and establish a center near the official conference for those NGO women that wanted to lobby the delegates.

The United Nations has had a long association with NGOs, recognizing them as a strong force in political life.

In fact, the U.N. Charter takes note of non-governmental organizations, and there is a procedure for registering them. The number of associations registered with the United Nations rose from 42 in 1946 to 205 in 1968 to 408 in 1988 to 1,327 in 1995.

Almost 600 NGOs have the right to attend meetings of the U.N. Economic and Social Council and U.N. international conferences as observers. These include CARE, Catholic Relief Services, the International Press Institute, the Sierra Club, the Salvation Army and other well-known, nonprofit associations.

The sudden plethora of these associations can be confusing.

“I want to reach out to the NGOs,” said Boutros-Ghali in a recent interview. “But we still have to find a way to know what are the important NGOs and the ones that are not so important. And I have to find out how do you get involved in the NGOs without getting into their wars.”

Skittish Governments

The skittishness of governments was illustrated in South Africa last year.

During the years of apartheid in white-ruled South Africa, many associations formed to help the economic lot of black South Africans and lobby for their rights. The United States and other donors funneled assistance to these African NGOs.

After black majority rule came to power in the elections of April, 1994, the new government of President Nelson Mandela was not sure how to deal with NGOs.

Jay Naidoo, a labor leader in the Mandela Cabinet, addressed a group of NGO leaders and told them: “Now that we have a democratic government, there is no need for NGOs to exist, because the democratic government . . . will be able to deliver to the disadvantaged community.”

This aroused howls of protest from the NGO leaders who insisted that they had developed skills in development and a rapport with the poor that the new government did not have.

“While it is true that in the dark ages of apartheid we provided services that the government would not provide,” said Rams Ramshia, director of the PACT office in Johannesburg, “that was not the only reason for our existence. We believe there is a strong need for a civil society.”

The government gave in and acknowledged the need for NGOs in a black-ruled South Africa. Naidoo’s deputy even proposed that the NGOs form coalitions so the minister could communicate with them more easily.

Mixed Outlook

Much of the rhetoric coming out of the United States’ Republican-controlled Congress should be comforting to NGO ears.

Many Republicans extol the virtues of private associations and preach that these associations ought to take over some of the functions of government. Speaker Newt Gingrich has even suggested that private charities could take the place of government welfare programs.

But NGOs are fretting about the changes nevertheless. They point out, for example, that members of Congress, even while preaching the disbursement of a higher percentage of foreign aid through NGOs, have cut the total amount of foreign aid heavily.

“When they shrink the pie drastically,” one NGO official said, “you end up with less money.”

Moreover, the congressional embrace of NGOs is not complete. Some members have made it clear that, while they support associations that provide services and charity, they have little time for associations that lobby for a cause.

In the long run, however, there appears little that anyone can do, within Congress or without, to change the trend. The age of non-governmental organizations has come.

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Aid Goes ‘Private’

The United States plans to funnel 40% of its developmental and humanitarian aid through non-governmental groups within five years. Here’s the past pattern for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is handling about 26% of U.S. non-military foreign aid in fiscal year 1995:

Sources: Inter-Action; USAID; ACTION-AID

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Banding Together

A few of the myraid non-govemental groups:

HABITAT FOR HUMANITY INTERNATIONAL

Purpose: Helping the needy build affordable houses for themselves.

Scope: Constructed 30,000 houses in 40 nations.

Annual budget: $35.6 million, mostly individual and corporate contributions.

LAUBACH LITERACY INTERNATIONAL

Purpose: Literacy and adult basic education, especially of women

Scope: Conducts programs in 29 nations.

Annual budget: $10.1 million, mostly individual and corporate contributions.