There is a call for civil society groups in New Zealand to co-ordinate funding for an agency to speak on their behalf over aid issues.
Presently New Zealand NGOs rely on the Council for International Development to raise any concerns it has about the nature of aid spending.
But CID has been hamstrung in recent years by cuts to its funding from the government, leaving the umbrella group for NGOs struggling to have an impact.
Australian National University academic Terence Wood is suggesting a new approach.
He told Don Wiseman he is advocating each NGO contribute to CID, or an organisation like it, giving it more resources and the independence to become a voice that is heard.
Mr Wood says it will involve each NGO making a small financial commitment.
Aid is unloaded from the C-130 Hercules.
Photo: DEFENCE FORCE
Transcript
TERENCE WOOD: Maybe something more analogous to the Campaign for Australian Aid which you have here in Australia at making cuts to aid and changes to aid a sort of public issue in Australia, and I am looking at the potential for that to be emulated in New Zealand, and the potential for that to be funded by New Zealand's aid NGOs chipping in a little bit of cash.
DON WISEMAN: How much do you think they would need to chip in?
TW: Well I have provided a number of figures in the analysis that I have undertaken but if start with a really low contribution, which is just .25 of a percent, or one cent out of every four dollars they raise out of revenue, you would be able to raise almost 400,000 dollars on that revenue alone. And that is all revenue excluding government revenue. If NGOs were able to contribute 0.7 of a percent, so the old target that everyone was extolling the government to try and reach in the past. Once again still a small sacrifice, NGOs would be able to provide over a million dollars a year for a campaigning entity.
DW: And you would expect the Council for International Development or whatever this body was to become to still hopefully have access to some government funding.
TW: Yes and that is a really interesting point and I am an academic and I guess I would leave it up to New Zealand's NGO community to decide what they thought the best division of labour would be. Maybe they would like to bring everything together under the Council for International Development - that seems fine to me, on the other hand maybe they'd like to have the campaign as something separate, something that didn't bring in any government revenue so that the government didn't have any leverage over it and what it said. Or maybe say no we could use a mixed model here and have some government revenue and some campaigning revenue that comes independently from NGOs. We don't mix the two up but we appreciate the fact that some revenue from the government is useful in the broader work that someone like the Council for International Development does.
DW: Now a lot of these NGOs have in the past had access to significant amounts of government revenue and that is now there to the same extent now. There is a lot competiton for the dollars that might come to them. I wonder if all of them are interested in advocating collectively. If they advocate as individual organisations they help to raise their own profiles don't they, so they may not like it, for that reason.
TW: yeah although I would argue that the reason they might want to pitch in together and advocate collectively is because if you are an individual NGO that gets some of your revenue from the government and you speak out and you criticise the government, you run the risk that the government will exact revenge and cut the funding that it gives you. So I think NGOs would be much safer if the pooled the funding together and had some other entity, the Campaign we will call it, that did the speaking for them. I think a collective voice is a safer and a louder voice.
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