Democracywatch Capacity Building Program for local NGOs
Democracywatch took a nationwide comprehensive capacity building program for local NGOs on Good Governance, Human Rights and Project Management. In this connection a total number of two hundred thirty local NGO's participated in this training program. This training program is recognized one of the best program of Democracywatch recently. This Capacity Building Program for Local NGOs started on 2003 and continuing till now.
It should be mention that the role of NGO's in Bangladesh has been
to supplement and
Complement the works of the government agencies. It is clear that
the NGOs reach to most needy people in a people friendly manner.
The NGOs are strong in:
a. Making the
people as the center of the development objective;
b. Making the people self reliant through the formation of saving
and credit groups, micro credit, lunching small scale income generating
enterprises, marketing etc.
c. Making the development process participatory involving the people
in real sense i.e.
in planning process, implementation and evaluation of community
based programs;.
d. Maintaining
flexibility in planning, implementation and evaluation of the programs
taking into consideration of the people's culture and tradition.
But due to different
reasons the performance of NGOs at the national as well as community
level has not been up to the expectation of the people. They are
criticized for their lack of
accountability, transparency, competency, sustainability and quality.
There are many
reasons for the low performance of NGOs such as:
Lack of
clarity of the vision.
Lack of
knowledge on how to develop organizational structure and system.
Lack of
activism.
Scarcity
of institutional materials and financial resources.
Problems
like, lack of confidence, assertiveness, vulnerable to repression,
weakpublicity, logistic constraints, and weak educational medium.
Facing the
identity crisis & donor dependency
Lack of
expertise in the field of their work
One of the important
reasons for lower level of performance of the NGOs is because of
low level of capacities of the NGOs. The NGOs have a plenty of people
with volunteer spirit and willingness to work among the disadvantaged
population in difficult situations. But a large numbers of NGOs
do not have competencies and capacities to deliver program, undertake
planning and management of the program, mobilization of local resources
and their management etc. Because of lack of such competencies,
most of the NGOs face questions about their sustainability and viability
of their organizations. Another criticism they face is that they
are concentrating only in Dhaka and other big cities. Whereas the
development focus is changing towards local NGOs for implementing
development programmes. As a consequence there has been a tremendous
growth of local NGOs. These organizations, usually powerful and
influential locally, often do not have the required management capabilities
to see their decisions through, let alone have the capability to
undertake development activities. What is needed is the capacity
of doing what the traditional institutions have failed to do. Bangladesh's
decentralization act provides space for local groups to ask questions
to both traditional and new social organizations. Therefore they
are in desperate need to be trained properly to be able to manage
development activities