I do not want big NGOs to disappear

People sometimes hear my criticism of international aid and assume I want the large NGOs abolished.

I do not.

When an earthquake destroys a city, when war cuts families off from food, when floods contaminate water supplies, large humanitarian organisations can move people, money and supplies at a scale that local groups may not yet be equipped to manage. Their staff often work in dangerous conditions. Many are local staff serving their own communities. Walking away from that capacity would not be reform. It would be abandonment.

My argument begins somewhere more difficult.

An organisation can be necessary in an emergency and still become part of the problem when the emergency has passed. It can arrive to save lives, remain to deliver services, and eventually become so central that local institutions cannot grow around it. What began as support becomes substitution.

That is when an NGO needs to know how to leave.

For too long, success in aid has been described through arrival: how quickly an organisation responded, how many people it reached, how much money it raised, how many programmes it delivered.

We ask far less about departure.

Who holds the authority when the international staff leave? Who owns the knowledge, equipment and relationships? Can the work continue without another foreign grant? Did local organisations become stronger, or did they spend years acting as subcontractors for somebody else’s strategy?

If the answers are uncomfortable, then the project may have delivered activity without delivering development.

Aid and development are not the same thing.

Aid can keep someone alive tonight. Development should change what is possible tomorrow.

Aid responds to immediate need. Development builds the capacity, institutions and economic conditions that reduce the need for outside intervention.

Confusing the two allows temporary programmes to become permanent industries.

This is not always the fault of the people working inside NGOs. Many entered the sector because they care deeply. The problem is structural. Organisations are rewarded for growth, reach and renewed funding. They are rarely rewarded for becoming unnecessary.

A successful business is expected to remain in business. A successful development organisation should sometimes be able to say: the work is locally led, the capability is established, the decisions no longer belong to us, and our role here is finished.

That is a very different definition of success.

Leaving responsibly does not mean selecting an arbitrary date, cutting the budget and wishing everyone luck. Nor does it mean transferring responsibility without transferring power or resources.

A responsible exit should pass at least four tests.

• First, local authority. The people affected must control the priorities and the decisions, not merely implement a plan written elsewhere.

• Second, locally held capability. Knowledge, systems, equipment and relationships must remain with local organisations and institutions.

• Third, durable finance. A programme is not sustainable if it collapses the moment the international grant ends. The economic model matters as much as the intervention.

• Fourth, accountability after departure. Communities need ways to judge whether the work continues to serve them, and to change it when it does not.

None of this is easy. In some places, conflict, political repression or institutional weakness makes departure dangerous or premature. Local leadership is not automatically perfect, just as international leadership is not automatically wise. Power can be abused at every level.

But difficulty is not an excuse for avoiding the question.

Every serious international organisation should be able to explain, from the beginning, what would need to become true for it to step back. Not because leaving is always the immediate goal, but because permanent dependence should never be the unspoken one.

After fifty years in development, I have become convinced that the organisations doing the best work are not those that make themselves the hero of the story. They are the ones prepared to transfer visibility, authority and eventually their own role.

They do not disappear overnight. They become less central by design.

That is not failure. It may be the clearest evidence that development has begun.

The question

We are collecting real examples of responsible exit and genuine transfers of power.

If you have seen an international organisation leave well, tell us what made it possible. If you have seen one stay too long, tell us what the consequences were. We are especially interested in accounts from local organisations and communities that inherited the work, or should have.

The next edition will examine the other side of this argument: whether aid intermediaries are sometimes unavoidable, and what useful work they can legitimately perform.

Benny Dembitzer