Introduction: The Lifeworlds and Trajectories of NGOs in Africa

Kalfelis, Melina C.; Knodel, Kathrin

doi:10.1515/9781800731110-004

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“…NGO staff like Maureen, Josephine, and Gifty did have to negotiate with the beneficiaries of their programs and they were passionate about the work that they did. We observed complex “lifeworlds” of NGO staff (Kalfelis & Knodel, 2021), including career ambitions, staving off their own precarity, and internal organizational maneuvering. Rather, predicaments around signatures reflect the structural inequalities of NGOs with their donors and their racialized underpinnings, the importance of upward accountability to donors, and the empirical realities of NGO staff as they worked to maintain their positions and credibility.…”

Section: Circulating Forged Signaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Biruk observes, “relations between donors and African‐led organizations are a site par excellence in which we can examine how racialized suspicion and stereotypes justify technologies of control and discipline” (2020, 496). The events we describe in this essay, however, happen relatively separate from NGO staff's direct interactions with (often White) donor staff, which better reflects the everyday working conditions of the “actors behind the formal shell of their organisations” (Kalfelis & Knodel, 2021, 7). Donor representatives were not permanently stationed in the NGO spaces that we occupied, and the everyday work of NGO staff did not often involve direct communication with their donors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Signing documents: Accountability politics and racialized suspicion in Africa's development audits

Hird‐Younger,

O'Sullivan

2024

PoLAR

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Good governance policies in international development require nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to translate their programs into documents that render NGOs knowable and accountable to their donors. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana and Uganda, we examine the signatures on these documents and the labor of NGO staff to obtain the signatures of aid recipients. We argue that signatures serve as mechanisms that NGO staff use to make their good governance practices traceable and to deter donor suspicion of funding misuse. Staff dedicate significant energy to imagining how signatures may or may not trigger donor suspicion. We posit that despite NGO staff's anxiety over getting signatures right—present, matching, and signed by the correct person—signatures can only ever defer donor suspicion. Such suspicion cannot be eliminated because it is deeply entrenched in racialized logics that position Global North donors as holding expertise and African NGOs as susceptible to corruption. Because NGO staff worry about donor suspicion rather than what aid recipients communicate with their (lack of) signatures, even fake signatures can circulate just as well as authentic ones. Tracing the social dynamics of collecting signatures sheds light on the racialized injustices inherent in Africa's development systems.

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Section: Circulating Forged Signaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%