Acountability for empowerment: Dilemmas facing non-governmental organisations

A recurring theme in modern development discourse is the role that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) play in providing mechanisms for strengthening civil society and with it local governance to lift marginalised communities in developing countries out of poverty through empowerment. Empowerment can result in the greater participation of the poor and marginalised in the economic, social, and civic domains within their communities. NGOs are seen to be ideally placed to perform this task, given their relatively closer proximity to the poor communities they serve however their accountability, particularly the ‘downward’ accountability to their constituents - the beneficiaries of their work can affect their role as empowerment. The dilemma that NGOs face is that first, they are generally not required by law or under their governance rules to be accountable to their constituents, and as a consequence there is a risk that any processes of accountability they adopt would not provide their constituency the necessary control that is required for genuine accountability.Second, the ’required’ accountability the NGO has to other stakeholders such as Government and supporters affects the ‘strength’ of the accountability relationship they can have with their constituents. Generally NGOs are guided by staff and self-appointed Boards, and see their role as promoting their values in advancing what they see as a broader community interests. A weakness of NGOs’ and their public benefit role is that they lack a defined accountability path to their constituency that a representative structure would provide. That is, while NGOs purport to represent the interests of their constituency, at a broader level there is no clearly defined path by which they can be held to account by that constituency in representing those interests. The first part of the paper looks at the accountability of NGOs, and the second part will look at the evidence from a number of case studies from NGO programs with poor women in India. Finally the paper identifies ways in which NGOs can strengthen their ‘downward accountability’ to their constituents and therefore improve their empowerment outcomes with poor and marginalised groups