Cambodian NGOs and Development

Cambodian NGOs have been active in Cambodia since 1991 and, supported by international donors, increased from twelve in 1992 to between 500 and 700 by the year 2000. There have also been around 150 international NGOs, mostly situated in urban centres. Added to this, an enormous number of surveys, studies and reports were generated throughout the 1990s. These outlined the situation facing women and described the projects aimed at empowering women. However, due to difficulties of access in many

parts of Cambodia, these were undertaken in or near urban centres, mainly Phnom Penh. During this period most NGOs adopted WID/GAD policies in line with donor recommendations, and it is widely acknowledged that many projects had the potential to contribute to the rebuilding of Cambodia and the development of civil society (Meas Nee and O’Leary, 2001:1). Organisations focusing on women attempted to redefine and expand the limited social, cultural and economic roles available to them through programs such as micro-credit, health and hygiene, literacy and vocational training, as well as assisting victims of HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, trafficking and forced prostitution. However, they faced many social and cultural obstacles in gaining public legitimacy and broader participation of the people.2

At the time UNTAC was preparing to withdraw from Cambodia, Mysliwiek (1993) warned that in a country as small as Cambodia the large scale of funding available for the support of local initiatives and organisations was of concern, especially if the availability of funding were to become the motivating factor for starting a local NGO. Later, Hushagen (1995) noted that potential funding and real salaries had very much become a motivating factor for starting such organisations in Cambodia. Through conducting on- site visits, interviews and questionnaires in 23 women’s NGOs, she found a disturbing lack of understanding of their purpose, with the phrase most commonly used being simply ‘to help women’. This was reflected in the often hastily written mission statements (probably assisted by uninformed expatriates) that had not been updated since registration in 1992. Most informants spoke of the vision for their organization in terms of “more money for the organization and the physical signs that go with it”. Only a few spoke of aiming to have an enduring impact on their clients. Clearly, Cambodian perceptions of the purposes of Western funded NGOs were not understood in the same way the funding agencies imagined.

In her 1995 Oxfam review, Hushagen found ‘disturbing results’. Based on a generic profile of an effective women’s organisation, she concluded that tens of thousands of dollars of public money had been contributed to people within NGOs who had little to no

2 _{Kumar (2000:16-19), in a working paper designed to attract funding from USAID, discussed the impact}

of women’s organisations in Cambodia, outlining the ways international funding contributed to the empowerment of vulnerable women. They claimed that although only a small fraction of Cambodian

general experience in the programs they were trying to manage. “Too often the money came without training or support. These people are working under the guise of an NGO in spite of the fact that they have no members, no boards and it appears accountability to no one but the donor who seems to be quite anxious to spend money in Cambodia. It is not unusual to find organizational leaders that cannot describe in any detail what they do, how they do it, for whom they do it and how much it costs. It is not a pretty picture.” A 1995 report by Ahlers and Vlaar agrees with Hushagen’s findings. They found that despite donor agencies “rewarding quantifiable action and conceptual accountability”, the WID and GAD policy statements of most NGOs had not been operationalised. Ahlers and Vlaar did not find a single engendered project activity during their fieldwork, and noted a wide gap between theory and practice. These kinds of problems persisted in many women’s NGOs and GAD programs throughout the 1990s.

As late as 1999, Kumar (2000:17) found that women’s organisations operating under the internationally funded GAD program administered by MOWA had little institutional capacity for collecting the data needed for monitoring and evaluating their activities. Women’s organisations saw funding donors as constantly changing their objectives, leaving their organisations devastated. Kumar lists the major sources of tension facing cooperation between Cambodian women’s organisations and the international community as: declines in funding; poor accountability by the women’s organisations and the women’s organisations’ complaints of the short-term vision of donors; poor management style of women’s organisations due to lack of division of labour or capacity for strategic planning; and barriers of language and culture including resentment of vast disparities in educational background and salaries of those employed by the international community.

Many of the reports and papers generated by members of the international community were skewed to their own agenda in order to prove their need for funding, rather than digging deeper in order to understand the priorities of the women they served. The continuing determination of some funding agencies to continue following their own generic policies regardless of the specific needs of Cambodian women was apparent. For

women were able to access assistance, the real contribution lay in generating public awareness of women’s problems.

example, Reichenbach (2001) in a project appraisal report on the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) contribution to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for strengthening legal support for gender mainstreaming in Cambodia, proposed an all too simplistic analysis of why women had failed to gain equal rights in Cambodia in the 1990s. She believed that the major reason women did not enjoy equal rights was the ineffective legal system which was in need of reform and the little use made of the equal rights for women and girls as guaranteed in the constitution and laws. Although this comment was true, she hardly touched on the wider socio-cultural issues hindering a more just Cambodian society, and the need for agencies to listen to the people themselves.

Thun Saray, leader of a local NGO community (cited in Curtis 1998:140) explained the primary need to assist Cambodians in overcoming widespread mutual distrust (stemming from the Khmer Rouge era) and learning to build up trust between NGOs and the different sectors. He maintained that gaining experience and understanding is a long- term process, and some foreigners have difficulty in comprehending the complexity of the situation. They attempt to force cooperation when the Cambodians are politely slow in responding, rather than working together with them to clarify the situation and help bring about satisfactory outcomes. Other commentators such as Hugh Watkin (1998) pointed out that the international community had ‘largely unrealistic expectations’ of the democratisation process in this ‘feudal’ society where patronage defines the political culture. He maintained that expectations need to be realistic to the situation, and donors need to have longer term perspectives in their policies, allowing more time for working with the people to bring about democracy and equity at all levels.