What can Heifer and other nongovernmental organizations do to be more effective in combating poverty and disease?
Heifer would not be a good example of doing something wrong, but it’s true, with many NGOs there’s a lot that’s not being done right. Let me take some examples from my own work in places I know best, for example Haiti. In Haiti there are literally thousands of NGOs and church groups, and you know, we’re not adding up to the sum of our parts, much less greater than the sum of our parts. Why is that? It’s a failure to coordinate, a lack of commitment to a shared vision of breaking the cycle of poverty and disease. I look at another experience in Rwanda where there are also many NGOs, many church groups and community organizations that are brought more carefully and more successfully into the process of creating a shared vision of development. There are also the NGOs who have too much overhead. After awhile you end up having contractors and NGOs who are really concerned more with their own survival than with the effectiveness of an intervention to break the cycle of poverty. That’s concer
