Saturday, 8 June 2013

Social responsibility and the importance of NPOs

Part 2 – The role and importance of NPOs

This week I attended my very first ‘village council’ meeting.  I joined out of curiosity: what really goes on, what is really discussed, and what is accomplished by these individuals among us who volunteer their time to community issues?  What are those issues?  I was pleasantly surprised!  Having grown up in a family that is largely suspicious of anything veering towards politics, I have remained, for most of my life, part of the indifferent (and sometimes ignorant) segment of the public which, in the previous blog post, I referred to as those who perhaps consider many of the more challenging aspects of the organisation of society better left to those who are more ‘capable’ or ‘knowledgeable’. 

But what I had always failed to take into account was that this was not merely a case of indifference or ignorance - many of us do care and are concerned about our world, our environment and the social problems facing us, and we do our own research and keep abreast of events happening around us.  Rather, this is a case of lack of know-how to act upon what it is we do care about: what public platforms exist for us to express our needs; how do we identify the areas that are most in need of attention and to whom do we address them?  Once they have been heard by the relevant ‘powers that be’, just how much can we expect from these powers, and how do we know that these needs are being properly recognised by them?

Social revolutions, both violent and non-violent, have been a mainstay of human history.  Where there has been repression or injustice there has always been a group or a movement that has risen to meet the dominating authority in a challenge to re-balance the scales of power.  And perhaps it is universal, the sense that each generation feels its own weight in time – the relative awareness that what is happening in one’s own time has the greatest bearing on the future, that we are always standing on the edge of history –but it cannot be denied that some of the most perplexing challenges in society have come about in very recent times, and mostly due to the rapid industrialization of our world. 

The divide between rich and poor has never been so grossly incalculable, and the very natural environment upon which our industrial ‘progress’, or ‘development’, relies has never before been so pushed to its limits.  No records exist of a previous human society that began signing treaties in efforts to decrease carbon footprints and reduce global warming.  Never before has so much wildlife conservation activism been born to address the horrors of the fast-disappearing wilderness and fragile ecosystems of our planet.  Never before have we humans been so determined to define our rights to life and freedom, and to seek out the terms of our own survival on this same planet.  And until now I don’t think that these issues have ever stood head to head on the global scale in which they do today.
 
And so, even though my council meeting dwelt upon issues that only affect the small community in which I live, as I sat there listening and taking notes it occurred to me that this experience was beautifully synchronous with my last two weeks’ attempt to explore how we, the public - The People – are truly standing up to the challenge of picking up the responsibility that we like to claim as our Democratic Right, how we are changing the question, “how much power do we really have?” into “what can we do with the power that we do have?”  Enter stage: the Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) as one of the answers to dealing with these mounting global problems. 

The NPO has its origins in the formation of the NGO, or non-governmental organisation, a term which received official recognition when the United Nations was first formed in 1945, but which has been documented as having its beginnings as far back as the time of the first anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements of the early 1800s.  There is much to be said about the development of NPOs worldwide in relation to the various challenges each nation state has faced in its own growth and change, however the focus of this post is on the role and importance the NPO has in current history, specifically with regards to the ‘developing world’, and in particular, our dear South African Republic.  

The non-profit sector of South Africa plays its most significant role in helping the government to fulfill its constitutional mandate in “the entrenchment of socio-economic rights that aim at improving the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person” (South African Bill of Rights).  Without the presence of this non-profit sector these rights would simply be completely out of reach for most South Africans, the majority of which live in impoverished circumstances. 

In a nutshell, NPOs play the following positive roles:
  • providing goods and services, especially meeting needs which have not hitherto been met by either the government or by the private sector;
  • assisting the government achieve its development objectives, in particular through contributing skills for which NPOs have comparative advantage, such as public information, education and communications campaigns, or providing information about the situations and needs of particularly vulnerable groups;
  • helping citizens to voice their aspirations, concerns and alternatives for consideration by policy makers, thereby giving substance to governments' policies regarding freedoms of association and speech;
  • helping to enhance the accountability and transparency of government and local government programs and of officials.


The citizenship of any country looks to its government to provide all or most of its basic needs, but the government is by no means omniscient, and faces its own limitations in addressing these needs.  To illustrate this point, let’s take the private industry as just an example: although it is easy enough to crack down on an advertiser who guarantees his product will grow hair in a week, it is much more difficult to measure whether a nursing home provides the solicitous care that relatives of helpless patients hope they are purchasing. And the more difficult it is to gauge whether an organization is supplying what consumers want, the more expensive and unsatisfactory monitoring becomes. It is easier, then, for government simply to control what the company does with its profits, on the assumption that without a profit motive, there will be little or no incentive to cut corners at the expense of poorly informed consumers. 

So when governments face the needs of the public, its drawbacks become all the more apparent.  Because it relies on the political process, it responds to the needs of the majority.  Although the majority may see the need for, say, national defence, public health, medical research, and zoos, they may not see the need for as much of these collective goods as some people would like to supply. NPOs are therefore the means by which citizens who want more of some collective good or service -whether they be schools, town halls or shelters for the homeless - can supply that need. NPOs are outlets for altruism and furnish trustworthy alternatives to profit-oriented provision of services and goods that are difficult to measure.

In the South African context, then, the NPO plays a pivotal role in helping the government address the needs of the majority, which is desperately in need of the basic services such as housing, health works, water and sanitation, a functional educational system, employment opportunities, empowerment of women, and food security, to name but a few.  The social (and environmental) challenges that face the government of this country can sometimes seem thoroughly insurmountable, especially when one takes into account the widespread tolerance of corruption from within the government itself.  So the flexibility of the NPO to work in ways that often bypass the very need for government’s influence, input or otherwise, is more and more frequently becoming a means of proper service delivery, albeit on a much smaller scale.  NPOs are one of the few vehicles that exist in South Africa to direct to the community resources that the government does not have or cannot collect.

Also, NPOs in our country play an important role in highlighting issues that might pass unnoticed by the local authorities, and in helping them to solve problems by using their human resources, local data and their organizational capacity, even monitoring their activities, these NPOs can offer tangible solutions to the community problems more efficiently and involving less costs than the public administrations in areas such as social work or management of social welfare institutions.  To this end NPOs in South Africa provide these essential ingredients:
  • working with and encouraging the officials and the government agencies to accept some variants of solving problems;
  • educating and informing the public of the rights provided by law and the increase of their awareness of these aspects; 
  • actively participating in adjusting the official programs to the needs of the community, expressing the public opinion and taking into account the specific conditions of the area;
  • aiding, informing and co-operating with official agencies;
  • influencing the local development policies of national and international institutions;
  • supporting the governments and donours to develop more effective development strategy through, for e.g. strengthening the institutions, increasing the level of professional qualification of their personnel, and training their staff in order to acquire a good management capacity.


I will finish this post with an excerpt from a speech delivered by our president, Jacob Zuma, at a NPO summit held on 16 August last year.  In it he directly addresses and praises these organisations for the valuable service they provide:

“In recognition of the invaluable contribution of the NPO sector to South Africa’s economic and social well-being, government enacted the Non-Profit Organisations Act in 1997 to create an enabling environment and align them with the Constitution of the Republic.

At that time, there was an estimated 10 000 registered organisations in both the formal and informal NPO sector.

There are now about 100 000 organisations in the NPO sector and more than 85 000 are registered in terms of the NPO Act.

The registration figures are highly impressive, given that except for welfare organisations seeking direct support from the Department of Social Development, registration under the NPO Act is voluntary.

It is the culture of transparency and respect for funders that the NPOs have opted to register and do everything above board. We acknowledge this sound management practice.

As government we appreciate the work of the NPOs as they complement our work and at times reach communities quicker as some are based within communities.

Many NPOs do valuable work in the field of child protection, prevention of women abuse, legal aid provision, food security provision, victim empowerment and a host of others.

We recall the invaluable support we received from NPOs as government during the drafting of the Children’s Act of 2005. It was remarkable that government and NPOs could work together so well on a piece of legislation, and in the end, the product is supported and implemented by all. There are lessons for all of us in the work that was done then, over 10 years.” (please read the full speech here)

Give people a platform and they will JUMP!

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The reader is encouraged to find out more about the history of NPOs as well as how the roles and functions of these differ globally according to how each of the nation states they serve fall into either of the two broader categories of industrialized, developed ‘Global North’, or developing ‘Global South’.

If you have a council in your area and you are interested in what takes place in these meetings, if you are concerned with what is happening in your village, town or county, I would recommend you take the step and go and find out.  There is a public platform within these groups that offers understanding, discussion and debate, and highly constructive problem-solving.

All views expressed are the author’s own, and do not necessarily
reflect those of Friends of Chintsa


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