Coordination

Coordination is rarely in the interest of the beneficiaries, and not always in the interest of agencies. Discuss.

When there were four refugee camps around the town of Yei in Southern Sudan, managed by four different NGOs there was an interesting ‘market’ for the refugees. It was not long before opinions were clear, while education might be better in camp A, health care was definitely better in camp C. Logically, this should have led to better services all round, but lax monitoring led instead to a different outcome: each refugee family distributed its members over all four camps.

And they got 4 food distributions.

Coordination actually takes away the ‘free market’ element from the beneficiaries and reduces their freedom to choose. It can be seen as a ‘disempowering’ [jargon] act as it takes away some of their possible choices and takes away from the agency the need to provide quality service, because there is no competition. We would not tolerate this in business, allowing people to set themselves up as a sole provider, and with limited provision at that.

While it is clear that beneficiaries do not always benefit from coordination, the agencies are also ambivalent about it. They subscribe to the principle, attend the meetings, but because they are also competing for funding they do not always subscribe to the practice, and may indeed sabotage it. Examples can be cited from any level from grass-roots NGOs (‘these are my people; no one understands them like I do’) to very big agencies (‘We accept coordination of course, but only to the extent it helps us’ – actual quote from a Unicef Representative).

just to show how keen we are on coordination consider this: In Goma in the early 2000s the four agencies in one compound always went to coordination meetings in four cars.

And how many times has a UN house actually contained ALL the UN bodies in a given town?

NGos are nto exempt - often coordination seems to exist only to cover up the fact that the NGOs don't have enough money to do all they want.