NGO Voices: "Our Mandate is Empowerment."

Interview with Ms. Shizu Upadhya
Senior Policy Research Officer
Action Aid Nepal
7 May 2001

Q. Where do you come from and with what nongovernment organization (NGO) do you work?

A. I am from Nepal, which is a country in South Asia, and I work with a development organization called Action Aid. I've been with them for about four years.

Q. What are the aims and activities of Action Aid?

A. Action Aid is over 25 years old. It's registered in London, England, and over the years has tried to change its image from just British to international, which is reflected in the fundraising it does now - it is not only UK-based. It works in thirty countries across Latin America, Asia and Africa.

We work in poverty reduction through community development among some of the poorest communities in the countries we work. Our mandate is through empowerment. Now that's a very big, nice word. What we mean by that is working very much with and through local communities rather than for them. In practical terms what that boils down to is that we work through NGOs, we don't directly implement our programs. We work with locally registered groups - Community Based Organizations, NGOs -- on a long-term basis, for never less than five to ten years at a time.

You'll find that the focus of our organization maybe five, six years ago was very much grassroots, looking down to the small communities, micro-level kind of work. In more recent years we are looking at macro issues as well. We realize that in order to address the real causes of poverty you may find the symptoms down there - illiteracy, high death rates, maternal mortality rates, starvation…but you'll often find that the causes are elsewhere. This is the recognition we came to.

So over the past five years we have shifted to so-called policy-level work, which includes policy advocacy and international campaigns, and are looking much more at policies of organizations such as ADB and the World Bank, and implications of the World Trade Organization.

Q. How did you get involved with Action Aid?

A. I have a bit of an unusual background. I spent a number of years out of the country and my father was involved in development work himself. So that, I think, influenced me. I got to see different parts of the world. I got very much a feel of the North-South relation. I got a feel of the North and then realized I was from the South and all this thing. And Action Aid in Nepal has a fairly good reputation and is quite rooted. It is not just something here today, gone tomorrow. It's been there for about 18 years. And for me, personally, it was a chance to get to know my country.

Q. How would you describe the NGO movement, the NGO community in Nepal?

A. Nepal has an interesting background in the sense that we have not really experienced democracy for a long time, it's only been ten, eleven years. If you equate NGOs, civil society, peoples' action with democracy, then you'd say we've only had ten years of that, just a very short period compared to the United States - more than 200 years. So in that sense there's still not too great an image of NGOs and I think we are still in the phase where you are sifting the good from the bad, and there are a lot of NGOs that don't have a good reputation and that are just in it for the money. There's perhaps not as vibrant an NGO community as you'd expect in the rest of South Asia - India, Bangladesh - there's very much activism going on there. You'll find much less in Nepal, but I think we're getting there…

Q. What do you hope to accomplish at this meeting?

A. This is relatively new area for my organization. We've felt much more at home, I think, working on drinking water, literacy programs, etc. so this is unchartered territory for us. We've seen this as an opportunity to learn more about the ADB. It seemed a nice place to start, the Annual Meeting. You know the ADB is made of people, not just some entity "up there", so there are humans as well, so talk to them, learn. We are taking a constructive attitude, partnership spirit, to learn from each other and recognize each other's strengths. But definitely, also influence ADB where we feel that we have perhaps a little bit of a comparative advantage.

Q. …and along those lines, how do you think ADB and NGOs should work together?

A. I think internationally everyone agrees now that aid is not only money. This is what the history of 50 years of development work has shown. A recent study by the World Bank has brought that out. It's very much ideas as well to really make aid work. If you really want an impact and not just end-of-year disbursement figures, if you want the impact, the money and ideas have to go together. Organizations like Action Aid and perhaps NGOs more broadly are closer to communities - maybe we are engaged with them for a longer time. I think to recognize that -- ADB has its role and there are others who may have other ideas, not necessarily always better, but maybe sometimes better. And then for organizations such as mine to know that ADB's strength is very much its knowledge bank, having all the ideas in one place all over Asia, which we could never have. There's lot of wonderful publications, we just don't have the money to bring out books like that. I think recognizing each other's strengths. I think one very good example of working together is this recent report by the World Commission on Dams -- for the first time you see constructive engagement. I really hope to see things like that much more in the days to come.

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Bart Edes, NGOs External Relations Officer, ADB