The role of Northern and Southern civil society in African development
Distinguished panellists from inter-governmental, private sector, donor and civil society organisations debated how big a contributor civil society can be to development efforts in Africa. It also tested our assumptions, and challenged our certainties, highlighting how the role of Northern NGOs must change if we are to stay relevant.
Panellists
- H.E Bience Gawanas, Commissioner of Social Affairs, African Union
- Michael Anderson, Director General for Policy and Global Issues, DFID
- Ingrid Srinath, Secretary General, CIVICUS
Moderated by: Mike Wooldridge, BBC World Affairs Correspondent
Edited highlights of the debate
Mike Wooldridge:
Exactly two hours and fifteen minutes ago the 20th anniversary edition of the UN Human Development Report was launched by Ban Ki-moon.
The first report in 1990 carried this extremely simple slogan ‘People are the Real Wealth of a Nation’. And today’s report argues that this approach has been vindicated essentially.
The headlines from it are these: "There is no silver bullet of policies that guarantees progress and there is no clear link between economic growth and human development".
It says that human development is different from economic growth and substantial achievements are possible even without fast growth.
It says that progress in human development has in fact been better than it sometimes looks. And there’s been most progress in health and education. And some of the greatest progress has been in some of the poorest countries.
Now it seems to me that those assertions in that report provide a very timely framework for this discussion: "Human development is the expansion of people’s freedoms to live long, healthy and creative lives. To advance other goals they have reason to value and to engage actively in shaping development equitably and sustainably on a shared plant. People are both the beneficiaries and the drivers of human development as individuals and in groups.”
So let us see if that is a view of human development that our panel here share and more specifically how they see the place of civil society within it.
Before we came on to the platform I actually asked them just a couple of minutes ago, what they mean by civil society. It seems to me it’s a term of course that’s used very often but maybe not everyone would define it in the same way.
Now I won’t tell you who said what but the three answers that I got were “Not government.” I asked for a very short definition. “Not government.” “It is everything which is not the state.” So similar to the first one. And this was the third “Any group of people getting together to do something bigger than themselves, from Trade Unions to Al-Qaeda and the Tea Party Movement.”
(Laughter)
Our first speaker will be Her Excellency Bience Gawanas. Namibian Commissioner of Social Affairs with the African Union today. A Lawyer by profession she set her sights on a career in law because at the time, she said the whole justice system was white in her country, in her region.
She played a key role in nurturing the newly independent Namibia in the early 1990s. And in her present post with the African Union co-ordinates policies and programmes on issues, including health, migration, population, drug control, social welfare and vulnerable groups. Labour and employment.
And somewhere in all of that she’s found time to come and say what she’s going to say to us now.
Bience Gawanas:
Thank you, thank you very much. Many many years ago, when I was part of the liberation struggle of Namibia I was a student here. There were two audiences that I always was very nervous to address. And those were students and civil society activists. But let me try.
I think I want to start by putting the African Union context or the African perspective. And to take it from there in terms of our understanding of the questions that we have to answer today. The African Union as you know is an inter-governmental organisation. But unlike the organisation of African Unity, it has said that it is a people’s organisation. In other words in whatever we do we have to put people at the centre of the organisation.
And therefore we have got the economic and social council that is made up of civil society organisations. And through that council we interact with civil society organisations.
In its strategic plan for the next four years, starting from 2009 to 2012 we have four pillars. Peace and security. Development co-operation and integration. Shared values and institution building.
And for the purposes of our discussion I want to focus on at least two of them. And that is development and shared values.
The second point that I would like to make and I think Mike has said that earlier and Ingrid and I mentioned that. Is that I want to dispel the myth that economic growth promotes social development. That there is necessarily a nexus between the two of them.
Because if that is the case then no woman should die while giving life. No child in Africa should go hungry. Because in terms of resources, Africa has got that. Where is it then that we go wrong? Should we start interrogating the economic policies upon which we try to interact with Africa? And I think more so for civil society organisations that are in a way involved in the developmental issues on the continent.
The other issue that I also want to really say to all of you is that I have never seen in poverty that people can still be proud. That they can still be resilient. That they can still stand up the next morning and try and put something on the table.
And I’m saying this because I do not want us to look at African communities as passive recipients of aid or charity. I think in our interaction with African communities we have to understand where they are coming from. We have to understand that when we interact with them they are a proud people. And it is that pride that has with or without our assistance, they have managed their lives. But obviously what we are saying is it fair that just because you were born on the African continent you should be less off than being born on another continent.
I at the moment deal a lot with maternal mortality issues.. That has been the campaign that we started on the continent.. And I can tell you and I’ve said it time and time again, it is a shame for Africa that women should die at the time that we all know that birth is supposed to be a joyous occasion.
So I thought I should throw that right from the beginning and say that this for me is the one of the context that I want to really raise the issues. The other one is the shared values.
Is it shared values amongst us as Africans? Or is it shared values between Africa and the rest of the world. And what are these shared values? Is it democracy, governance, human rights. What about African solidarity? What about the fact that throughout my lifetime I’ve always believed in Ubuntu. That I am because you are.
And I think that’s maybe what the Secretary of State was talking about earlier today. When he said there is a moral imperative in whatever we are doing. And the moral imperative for me is that we are all human beings and that is the values that we share. The value of humanity.
And so if I have some bread on my table and my neighbour does not have bread on his or her table, surely there is something that we share and that is where we come from in terms of the African Union and the discussion that we had on shared values.
I have all my life been a human rights activist and I have always said that I do not want social development issues to be looked at simply from the perspective of welfare. It is a right of people to a dignified living.
We are talking today about civil and political rights. But we need to start putting economic, social and cultural rights also at the front of our work. Because it’s only then that we can truly give meaning to the human rights discourse, especially in our part of the world.
Now having said that, what is the relationship for example between civil society organisations and the state. And should we always have to take that as our point of departure, in terms of the relationship between civil society and the state. As the ombudswoman of Namibia people always used to ask me “How do you get along with the government?” And I said “I’m in a love/hate relationship with the government and it suits me fine.” Because if we are too much in love something is wrong with the way that I do my work. If they hate me too much then there must also be something wrong with the way that I do my work.
So if civil society organisations are in a love/hate relationship, then maybe that is the way to go. Because at the end of the day we are calling it creative tension isn’t it? Whenever we say we are holding governments to account, surely there will never be – and no one is happy to have a watch dog, looking over you all the time. But the question that I had been posing to my fellow panellists here, is if civil society organisations are holding governments to account, to whom are they themselves accountable? And I think for me that is a very fundamental issue because that is also the issue that makes governments or anybody to start questioning the role of civil society organisations.
So when we are talking about governance let us not put ourselves outside and look from the outside in. We are part and parcel of the governance discourse. Whether it’s in England, whether it’s in Namibia and everywhere else. So the same questions that we’re asking of governments are the same questions we need to ask ourselves as civil society organisations.
I’m glad of one thing that the Secretary of State also raised this morning, and that was the question of results. You can pump a lot of money into efforts but as long as people keep on dying, as long as we don’t have an impact on the lives of people, then the question is what then is our role?
So the results, the outcome of our efforts is also very very critical. And so the peer review, how do we peer review ourselves in terms of the impact that we are making. Not the number of civil society, not the quantity but I guess we are looking at the quality.
But as I would always say, that there is, and I want to believe there is a role of civil society organisations. But I also want to end by just saying that if there was a gap, maybe 20 years ago in Africa, as far as civil society organisations are concerned, I want to tell you that civil society organisations have grown on the continent.
The question is therefore what should be the relationship between northern civil society organisations and African civil society organisations. Should we go and do exactly what NGOs are already doing? Or are we going to complement and supplement and for that matter build the capacity. Because I can tell you, I’m not saying that no one has got the right to go to Africa and work in Africa. But I can tell you that if you go into those villages and you come within a cultural and a traditional and African perspective, I’m sure that if I’m an African NGO and I am an African civil society organisation, I will have a much better understanding as to where that community is coming from and what they are doing.
So the complementary roles are absolutely critical. But let us also in our efforts in assisting Africa, build the capacity of the southern NGO’s and I will end there.
Mike Wooldridge:
Michael Anderson is today Director General for Policy and Global Issues at the Department for International Development.
At earlier stages of his DFID career he was in charge of programmes in India, the Middle East, North Africa, Iraq. He headed the policy team on Fragile States, Justice, Security and the Rule of Law.
Divisions I read under his lead, this year responsible for a budget of £4.3 Billion. That is correct that figure is it?
Michael Anderson:
Yes.
Mike Wooldridge:
So I hope, and I imagine many people here will hope that you will perhaps tell us how much of that you’re spending on African civil society.
Michael Anderson:
I would say a couple of things about DFID’s approach. I wouldn’t hold myself out as an expert on the role of civil society in Africa. And nor do I think would anyone in DFID hold themselves out to be an expert on this topic.
I think the starting proposition for us is that aid is a very significant and important component in development but it’s also a very limited component. And that the real driver of development and social improvement is not just economic growth is the dynamism and energy and imagination and creativity of people living in this case, talking about Africa.
And I think one of the important messages we want to have in DFID is that we want to make sure that we use our limited resources in a really effective way. But we’re really very very aware that our role in this is small and therefore it’s important to get our involvement right.
We put huge store by the role of civil society. I don’t actually have the Africa disaggregated figures, we spend about 15% of our total bilateral funding on civil society. A bit more than that when you include the multilaterals. And we view the role of civil society both north and south as incredibly important.
I have to say I bristled a bit with the title, because I don’t feel that northern NGOs are homogenous, I don’t feel southern NGOs are homogenous. And I think we might be getting to the point, because of the diversity of the kinds of civil society activity around the world, those categories may be less helpful than they used to be, operating on the global stage. So I’m not going to enter into that debate of the comparison of those two categories because I think there are other categories that are perhaps more useful.
I do think that from – let me share with you, from where DFID’s coming from. We have three main areas we’re really very interested in at the moment on the role of civil society. And the Secretary of State spoke about a lot of other things this morning, but I’m just going to pick up these three.
One of them is that we are noticing from African Governance surveys, for example the Ibrahim Index 2010, signalling a really real danger of reduced political space across the continent, particularly on participation and rights and rule of law and security. And we’re very worried about the growth of statutes which regulate this space of civil society and a distinct pressure being put on the political space of civil society.
DFID is a political, so we’re not endorsing particular political points of view. But we do feel that it’s terrifically important that that space be made available to civil society, both within specific countries but also for the transnational links that have to occur. And the flow of ideas and people and funding and initiatives is incredibly important. So that’s one thing we’re worried about.
I think the second thing that we’re paying a lot of attention to at the moment is trying to think for ourselves to refresh our own approach to how we can provide support to civil society which maximises the potential benefit. And DFID has for a long time focussed on civil society as entities for delivering services, as entities for holding governments to account and as entities for advocacy. I think those are kind of the three broad categories we’ve tended to use.
I think with the new government here and the kind of ideas around big society, I think we’re more acutely aware that we’ve paid less attention in the past than we should to the kind of dynamism and energy and synergies that can be found in civil society movements, which don’t depend on the state for delivery.
I think that in the past we’ve perhaps too much looked to NGOs to augment the state or to hold the state to account, but actually the autonomy and dynamism of civil society to achieve things on its own, even if the state’s not involved, is something we’ve probably we’re trying to pay more attention to.
And some of that dynamism is around improving citizen’s access to information, creating platforms for citizen engagement, supporting citizens to have new forms of delivery organised around and with the state. So I could say more about that and in that space we’re interested in particular the impacts on new technologies, and new forms of social organisation in increasing effectiveness.
And then the last thing I’ll mention, or the third area that we’re looking at quite a lot, which the Secretary of State mentioned this morning and which Bience has just mentioned, which is we feel that the entire development enterprise, whether it’s governments, whether it’s donors, whether it’s international agencies or whether it’s NGOs, that there’s just a much stronger call for all of us to be much better about results. And being much more explicit about, being clear what it is we’re trying to achieve and being clearer in measuring it and having a stronger story, a more honest story.
And in that I think we’re particularly interested in having a more honest conversation in which we share amongst ourselves stories about what has failed as well as what has succeeded. All of us, whether it’s DFID or International NGOs or local NGOs have very strong incentives to tell strong stories about what’s gone well. And that’s not a terrific environment for learning. So I think we would like to encourage more honesty about, what’s worked but also what’s not worked and why it’s not worked, and what we can do better next time.
So those are three areas that we’re paying attention to, and I’ll stop at that.
Mike Wooldridge:
Our third panellist and speaker is Ingrid Srinath who’s the Secretary General of CIVICUS, which has been described I read as the global family of civil society. She joined CIVICUS after nine years with the Mumbai based organisation Child Rights and You, perhaps better known by its acronym CRY and before that she worked extensively within the private sector.
And in a speech in August I read that you said in the wake of the great economic financial crisis that international institutions have seen their hand strengthened. Markets having accepted vast infusions of cash from taxpayers, have returned to their predatory ways. Civil society is reeling from cutbacks in support from donors, support from government, private philanthropy and public giving alike, especially for work that doesn’t show instant, easily measurable results. There’s spiralling demand for urgent relief from even larger numbers of individuals, families and communities pushed to the brink of survival by disasters and greater curbs on our freedom than even those imposed in the name of the so-called War on Terror.
So just three months ago you were painting an extremely bleak picture really, which doesn’t I think exactly square with the cautious optimism that I was quoting from today’s UNDP Human Development Report.
Ingrid Srinath:
Mike I am impressed with the detail of your research. Granular. It sort of just serves to intimidate me a bit more. I feel like I’m the least expert person on Africa in this room almost at the moment. I’ve only lived there for two and a half years. But CIVICUS does have members in about 54 African countries. And we work of course in global alliances with a number of partners across Africa.
So I’m going to try and draw on some of that to really paint a more African picture of that broad generalisation that you just quoted.
As I said most of you know more about this than I do so I shan’t have to belabour the obvious. But the reality is that even before the financial crisis broke, most of Africa was not on target to meet the MDGs. There were exceptions, but by and large most of the continent was not going to meet the MDGs. What’s changed since then is there’s, well, shall we say shaky commitments on ODA. Some amount of blurring of timelines and definitions to include flows that were not originally included in the commitments. 2010 is now 2013, 2013 is now 2015, so there’s a degree of uncertainty there.
Remittances dried up. Many African countries that are depending on commodities for their GDP, saw both the demand for those commodities fall as well as the prices of those commodities fall. A double whammy if you will.
And finally of course foreign direct investment that had actually begun to flow in serious quanta into the continent over the last ten years, dried up, or went elsewhere.
And the fact that this happened just when Africa in many ways, and many parts of Africa to the extent that generalisations are possible across a continent, was really coming out of decades that were lost to conflict. Fragile democracies were being nurtured. There was interest from global investors as I said. And there were institutions that were taking root at national levels but also at pan-African levels made the shock a particularly bitter pill to swallow for Africa.
And then as this crisis sort of morphed you know from financial to economic and then into political and social, as it sort of spread from the US to the EU and took other hydra like , hydra like trades. As it became evident that the recovery was going to be neither as quick nor as comprehensive as people had hoped, other forms of impact became evident.
As I said not only are our commitments on aid are shaky at best, there’s a shift in priorities. So what we’re seeing is a withdrawal from more multilateral mechanisms and a preference for bilateral mechanisms and we’re certainly seeing greater alignment of ODA with strategic interests, be they trade or be they national security.
Or simply, even if you want to attribute any malicious intent to these, simply there’s more narrow technocratic approach. That says we are going to put mosquito nets and vaccines and aids medication and solar panels and somehow that’s going to radically change the face of Africa.
What was clear at the MDG Review Summit in September and became even clearer at the World Bank Meetings last month in Washington, was that there is a return, as I said and as you quoted me, almost to the belief that growth at any cost is the single biggest priority of the western world at the moment. And literally at any cost. And that there’s a greater reliance than ever on the private sector, as government’s find their fiscal elbow room if you will, constrained.
From a civil society perspective what I said continues to hold in some ways it’s worse. Which is that we’re seeing the reversal of two decades of the struggle to find a more participative, inclusive form of global decision making. Or national decision making or regional decision making. We’re seeing a U-turn on that and whether it was the G20 here in London or whether it was Copenhagen or whether it was Toronto or whether it’s other meetings across the world. You are now seeing less and less room for civil society to be in the room, to have a seat at the table, to even influence the conversations that are happening.
The other thing we’re seeing of course is that despite what many of us seems like a round discrediting of this neo-liberal market fundamentalist world view that we’ve all been held hostage by for the last 30 years. The governments of the world still seem to be trapped in that same paradigm. They still seem to essentially be the victims of what I’m calling, and I will be a little nasty here, a hostile takeover of governance by private interests. Those private interests vary across Africa and in different parts of the world, it’s sometimes business, it’s sometimes military, it’s sometimes religious. It’s sometimes some ungodly combination of those three. But this is the reality we’re dealing with. And in some senses it’s civil society that remains the only compensating factor to the fact that our governments are now enthralled to markets.
I mean it was not uncommon a few years ago when you travelled across Africa to hear people express disillusionment with democracy generally. I can remember people saying “What’s the point of even voting in an election when eventually decisions are going to be made in some smoke filled back rooms by people, men usually, doing deals.”
I’m not hearing that in the north. I mean in countries like Canada, in countries like Holland, I’m hearing average citizens saying “Is there any point.” To this democratic model that were talking about, in fact we have so little say in the decisions that are made.
There’s a Professor of Sociology in South Africa who actually describes this progressive descent of the poor. You know from originally citizens with claims on society to then consumers with no money to consume in this market paradigm. To finally a problem to be managed by development experts. And then eventually to sort of these unruly mobs who have to be beaten into submission and consigned to camps on the fringes of our cities.
This tragically is no longer just a third world or an African problem. It’s now seeping onto your doorsteps and I think it fundamentally redefines the dynamic between northern civil society and southern.
Here in Europe as in Africa this anger that people feel at being completely rendered powerless in their own, in the decisions that affect their lives is quite often it’s channelized into xenophobia, tribalism’s of various kinds. And this is now a phenomenon here in Europe as much as it is in Africa or other parts of the world.
The phenomenon that we’re seeing now, post financial crisis, that exacerbates the impact of this Global War on Terror, is despotic regimes around the world and in Africa as much as anywhere else, will now get a free pass from northern governments if they can provide access to markets or to capital or to energy and other natural resources. This is the reality of many countries in Africa.
And as, what we call the west, starts to jockey for influence with the new emerging powers in the east, that the standards on human rights, the standards on what is okay and what is not from governments, have dropped really sharply.
I really, if I have to sort of sum up in a sense what I see in my limited capacity to speak for civil society in Africa. What civil society in Africa needs from civil society up north is number one, hold the standards here. Because we’ve learned from the Global War on Terror that when you let your standards slip that provides cover for a lot of our rulers to do likewise.
The second thing that you can provide really is access for our voices, our stories, into global fora and into global media. And I’m here referring both to success stories and to the looming threats.
The third one really is advocacy for and support to investments in the architecture and fabric of civil society itself. Not civil society as a service delivery channel. Not civil society just necessarily as a capacity builder, but the sort of thing that Bond does. And the value that Bond provides into its constituency is the sort of infrastructure that is sorely lacking in many African countries.
Fourth, real solidarity when we are actually confronting these threats. We need to be able to call on you to write in, phone in, get those op-eds out every time we face this threat.
But finally really, or two final ones. I think also faith in our capacity to define our own solutions. And working together in developing an alternative vision of what we want society to be. Because God help us we actually were to let say get five times the money we currently have. And we were to run through MDGs one through six, at the risk of the plant then imploding. What point would that be?
So really the fundamental development paradigm I think is discredited. And we really need to work together, north and south, to envision the pieces of the jigsaw, the pieces of the jigsaw are all there. You’ve got lots of pointy headed people have done lots of incredible work, especially here in this country, on analysing and proposing alternates.
We need to join those dots, we need to get the pointy heads, if you will, in alliance with the round heads and make this a truly joy and shared vision.
That’s where I will leave it for now.
Mike Wooldridge:
What would you say really determines most how effective, vocal and evident a civil society is in an African country?. Because it is the case isn’t it that in some countries civil society is much more evidence and much more influential than it is in other countries. You might think particularly of South Africa for example, over this last three decades or so.
What would you say it is? Is it the space that government gives to civil society? Is it what civil society can force for itself? Is it the international climate and the pressures of the international climate, or is it something else? What determines how effective civil society is?
Bience Gawanas:
I think Michael mentioned that civil society is not a homogenous group. I think it’s the diversity that allows some to flourish and others to not flourish. And I will tell you why I am saying this.
If you look inside any country, you have got for example community based organisations. You have got groups that are advocacy groups. Call them women’s organisations or those that will be speaking for children’s rights etc. So all these different types of NGOs will definitely have a very different relationship vis-a-vis the state. If you are at the community based level, the challenge that we have is are you taking over the role of the state? Are we not getting governments off the hook by sometimes stepping in where they in fact have got a responsibility. And I do believe that in the context of Africa there is no way that one can minimise the role of the state or the role of the government.
I was giving an example of sports. Sports. And you know FIFA will say governments must stay out of soccer teams and IOC will say this, that and the other. And I would ask always the question “In Africa which soccer club owns a stadium?” Maybe in South Africa, but in Namibia the stadiums are maintained by government. If athletes have to go and participate, for example in the Olympics, it’s not private sector that sponsors them, it’s governments that sponsors them.
So what I’m trying to say is that there is always going to be this kind of like question. Whether NGOs, especially those that are providing the basic services, in the ruler areas, in those areas, whether or not they are diminishing the role or getting governments off the hook. Then you obviously have the ones that are at the forefront in terms of advocacy for human rights, for better governance. The advocacy groups will also have a different relationship vis-a-vis the state. And therefore the question of the political space or the policy space, therefore becomes an issue.
Mike Wooldridge:
Should civil society necessarily be in opposition to government? Necessarily be critical of government? That’s often how it likes to be seen. That’s often how it portrays itself. That often makes governments in turn suspicious of civil society doesn’t it? And brings about the crackdowns and so on.
And of course as an alternative to that we’ve had a number of governments in Africa, particularly perhaps in transition out of conflict, who start off with what they call a political movement, trying to embrace everybody. Saying “Let’s try that for a few years before we move to elections and so on.” Is that a healthy and proper way to go or is that a problem? Should civil society try and strike up a different kind of relationship with government?
Ingrid Srinath:
I think civil society needs to have the independence from government to hold it accountable for example. I don’t think that necessarily means an incessant head-butting. I think you have a really good model in this country actually of a relationship between civil society and government that is, can be adversarial at times, can be collaborative at times. That seeks input from civil society but is not you know in any way beholden, there’s no beholdeness on either side.
I think the three things we’re looking for really is first of all an enabling environment and by which I mean first of all the freedom to exist. There’s countries where even that you can’t take for granted. Then the capacity in a sense to engage which requires knowledge, it requires skills, it requires access, it requires resources and finally legitimacy.
I think in any civil society organisation anywhere lives and dies by its legitimacy. But it may not be the exact same kind of legitimacy that Governments in business have. So in fact it is because civil society does not have to go back to an electorate every five years and because it doesn’t answer to shareholders every quarter that it’s able to incubate stuff that for example has a longer gestation period or that is not immediately popular.
And so I would say that the norms for accountability and legitimacy for civil society need to be somewhat different from the ones that are, the need to be equally strong but different from the ones that are applicable to government and market.
Bience Gawanas:
But Ingrid can I take you up on that one. And I don’t know whether it was you said that earlier the suspicion that comes, especially in our context is that there is no NGO in terms of sustainability that can have funding from its own sources with the result that many African NGOs rely to a great extent their funding from outside sources.
Now that creates the kind of suspicion. It’s a debate that exists on the Continent and that is if you get your funding from an NGO sitting in England or in America how independent are you? You might be independent from me as the Government but are you independent from the norms and the standards that are here? So those are also the kind of challenges.
Ingrid Srinath:
Almost any legislative framework you look at in Africa requires NGOs to report on where they get their money from, who was funding them and how they’re using that money. I mean that is almost a basic hygiene factor across Africa. So that’s a, I mean it’s an argument that doesn’t hold water simply because it’s a requirement, it’s the price of entry if you will across most countries.
Mike Wooldridge:
And which is a fact that can pose a particular challenge can’t it to a Government owner like the FID. I mean do you have to be very discreet about some of the funding you do to civil society?
Michael Anderson:
Look I think in terms of the factors for success of civil society I think Ingrid’s hit three of the factors kind of on the head. And legitimacy is absolutely central.
Ingrid Srinath:
Yes.
Michael Anderson:
I think there really is a challenge that a lot of civil society in Africa is not able to fund itself. And until we get to a point where that is more sustainable there are going to be questions about legitimacy. I don’t think I mean some people are in the camp of “Oh once there’s funding for overseas then they must be playing out an overseas agenda.” I don’t think that’s true often I think.
But I’d like to go back to the point. I’m a little bit nervous about a fairly narrow view of civil society in this conversation. Right I think Ingrid, I may be wrong but I think the kind of view you have is it’s about NGOs really. And I think what I don’t recognise in your account is the kind of dynamism that comes from all those tiny organisations as well as big national movements.
And I guess what I see in Africa is a lot more now they’re true, there’re big funding problems but there’s a lot more energy of people getting together and solving problems collectively. And a lot of that doesn’t feel to me like it’s trapped in what did you call it? The neo liberal market fundamentalists jail or whatever it was. I mean it just doesn’t feel like that’s the kind of emotional energy around it often. I realise that there’s other stuff going on but I think that kind of the dynamism of civil society in Africa’s growing despite the political challenges.
Bience Gawanas:
I agree I think there’s not only greater diversity of kinds of movements and kinds of organisations. I mean from you know farmers cooperatives to women’s groups to youth groups. I mean people doing stuff with street theatre then that is changing lives.
But and it’s not just sort of at the local level and national level, I think there are better connections that are being built across civil society, across Africa and between African civil society and the rest of the world. I think African intergovernmental institutions have come a long way.
This new African peer review mechanism for example provides a fabulous channel for civil society and government to actually work together or in non adversarial ways where possible. But the problem of being poor is that it takes up all your time as somebody said. And it’s really hard to prepare yourself for a peer review mechanism type meeting if what you’re doing is struggling to survive.
