Dear Al, On one side you are perfectly right: large corporations do have resources like technical expertise, logistics and capital, that could and should be leveraged to fight poverty (yet be aware of Halliburton's performance in Iraq or the Water-companies in Bolivia).
Yet I'm afraid that your definition of NGOs only comprises that type of organization you yourself are involved with: Northern, mostly philanthropic associations, that make their living from donor money and sponsoring/executing smaller or larger, but never large-scale-projects. The term NGO within developing countries extends far beyond this limited vision, as here NGOs are all types of social organizations of the "beneficiaries" themselves, when they are not established as commercial or public entities. This means a teachers-organization is an NGO -and most of their programs go way beyond classical trade-unions- as they are student-associations, small farmers associations, women's-associations, health-associations and so on. Many of them are confined to a single location, others have found ways of coordination and collaboration on a larger scale, up to whole countries or even beyond. This framework -almost a natural one and not something crafted- joins more expertise on Development-issues, success and failures and the reasons why, then the whole bunch of experts of large multilateral organizations like Worldbank, UNESCO, UNDP, FAO and (!) the big corporations jointly. For a strikingly simple reason: it's their life that's at stake not only success-reports or quarterly earnings. To get again into numbers: let's assume that you need one person-day to train 25 persons in how to use the Internet (or more generally, some ICT-application) for their benefit. This converts into 160,000 person-days to train 4 million farmers or the equivalent of 667 man-years. (Already almost out of scope to be done by highly-skilled and highly-paid professionals of the corporate world: it wouldn't make sense economically with respect to ROI). If we scale it up to let's say 200 Million farmer-families, we would need about 34 thousand person-years to do the job - completely beyond capacity of even the largest corporate entity. And we didn't even take into account that there at least about 50 or 60 local idioms to be considered, hundreds of different cultural traditions and thousands and thousands of different local social settings, in which each needs a sometimes larger sometimes smaller adjustment of training-materials, strategies and settings. So without close-support of local NGOs the task cannot and hence will not be done. Corollary: the true challenge is not getting the corporate-world involved but to get thousands of local NGOs involved as counterparts. The former is almost simple -convince the CEO and the Board of Directors, maybe some important shareholders. The second is the truly hard task, but unavoidable if you would like to succeed "on scale". Yours, Cornelio P.S. For some reason MIT-media-lab "left" India, AT&T & Bellsouth sold out completely their ICT-business in Latin-American (i.e., even the best of the corporate-world sometimes doesn't match with local conditions and traditions). ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html>
