NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

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NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

More good than harm
6
33%
More harm than good
9
50%
Don't know as I haven't got enough information to make a decision
3
17%
 
Total votes: 18
ot mien kampf
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by ot mien kampf »

juansweetpotato wrote:
ot mien kampf wrote:
juansweetpotato wrote:
frank lee bent wrote:aside from the obvious damage to the kids, Pisey is in fact NOT a sex worker as Sunrise claims.
They are lying to get money.
If they lie to get it i imagine they lie about how they spend it.
You'd have to prove that they damage the kids in the photo first. They held up one child as an example, saying she was condemned in her community or something. Sounds bollocks to me if it was just a photo in a brochure alone. Maybe she would get hassle at school?

After reading what exactly Sunrise get up to, how many kids they help and they're future plans, I would say the donors get real value for money. Do the sums.
So being a child prostitute steals the innocence of a girl, but calling a girl a child prostitute for the world to see causes no damage at all? There's no disclaimer saying she's a paid actor.

This ad is another case of self righteous people thinking the ends justify the means because they imagine their cause to be worthy. They sure have no compunction misleading poverty stricken Khmer for a dollar, using her image as a way of earning money, and then telling us it's fine because the Khmer get a small cut... similar to the pimps they campaign against.
I think it depends on whether the 1000+ kids would get helped if they didn't run ad campaigns like that. Otherwise, I would have to agree with you.BUT If it means that 1000 kids suffer because one child has her photo linked with prostitution then it seems an easy call to make.

Incidentally, they must have kids that are not actors that have had bad things happen to them. Should they be photographing those kids instead? Or is that worse?
If a mother pimps out one kid to feed 10 other children, is that an "easy call to make"?

Harming one child to benefit a few more?
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by juansweetpotato »

ot mien kampf wrote:
juansweetpotato wrote:
ot mien kampf wrote:
juansweetpotato wrote:
frank lee bent wrote:aside from the obvious damage to the kids, Pisey is in fact NOT a sex worker as Sunrise claims.
They are lying to get money.
If they lie to get it i imagine they lie about how they spend it.
You'd have to prove that they damage the kids in the photo first. They held up one child as an example, saying she was condemned in her community or something. Sounds bollocks to me if it was just a photo in a brochure alone. Maybe she would get hassle at school?

After reading what exactly Sunrise get up to, how many kids they help and they're future plans, I would say the donors get real value for money. Do the sums.
So being a child prostitute steals the innocence of a girl, but calling a girl a child prostitute for the world to see causes no damage at all? There's no disclaimer saying she's a paid actor.

This ad is another case of self righteous people thinking the ends justify the means because they imagine their cause to be worthy. They sure have no compunction misleading poverty stricken Khmer for a dollar, using her image as a way of earning money, and then telling us it's fine because the Khmer get a small cut... similar to the pimps they campaign against.
I think it depends on whether the 1000+ kids would get helped if they didn't run ad campaigns like that. Otherwise, I would have to agree with you.BUT If it means that 1000 kids suffer because one child has her photo linked with prostitution then it seems an easy call to make.

Incidentally, they must have kids that are not actors that have had bad things happen to them. Should they be photographing those kids instead? Or is that worse?
If a mother pimps out one kid to feed 10 other children, is that an "easy call to make"?

Harming one child to benefit a few more?
That's an extreme analogy don't you think? From a healthy child being photographed and used in a fund raising campaign to a real child sex/ physical abuse victim being helped by people who took the time to care. It reminds me of Curb your Enthusiasm when a surviver from the TV show meets a surviver of the Nazi concentration camps. The guy from the TV show wasn't backing down, lol.

Like I said before, would it be better if they used a real victim's photo? Or stayed away from that kind of advertising and had to close their programs down or severely restrict the amount of kids they help?
Last edited by juansweetpotato on Sun Jun 05, 2016 8:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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ot mien kampf
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by ot mien kampf »

juansweetpotato wrote:
ot mien kampf wrote:
juansweetpotato wrote:
ot mien kampf wrote:
juansweetpotato wrote:
You'd have to prove that they damage the kids in the photo first. They held up one child as an example, saying she was condemned in her community or something. Sounds bollocks to me if it was just a photo in a brochure alone. Maybe she would get hassle at school?

After reading what exactly Sunrise get up to, how many kids they help and they're future plans, I would say the donors get real value for money. Do the sums.
So being a child prostitute steals the innocence of a girl, but calling a girl a child prostitute for the world to see causes no damage at all? There's no disclaimer saying she's a paid actor.

This ad is another case of self righteous people thinking the ends justify the means because they imagine their cause to be worthy. They sure have no compunction misleading poverty stricken Khmer for a dollar, using her image as a way of earning money, and then telling us it's fine because the Khmer get a small cut... similar to the pimps they campaign against.
I think it depends on whether the 1000+ kids would get helped if they didn't run ad campaigns like that. Otherwise, I would have to agree with you.BUT If it means that 1000 kids suffer because one child has her photo linked with prostitution then it seems an easy call to make.

Incidentally, they must have kids that are not actors that have had bad things happen to them. Should they be photographing those kids instead? Or is that worse?
If a mother pimps out one kid to feed 10 other children, is that an "easy call to make"?

Harming one child to benefit a few more?
That's an extreme analogy don't you think? From a healthy child being photographed and used in a fund raising campaign to a real child sex/ physical abuse victim being helped by people who took the time to care. It reminds me of Curb your Enthusiasm when a surviver from the TV show meets a surviver of the Nazi concentration camps. The guy fro the TV show wasn't backing down lol.

Like I said before, would it be better if the used a real victims photo? Or stayed away from that kind of advertising and had to close their programs down or severely restrict the amount of kids they help?
These programs can only work by exposing either an actual prostitute or calling a child actor a prostitute, there's literally no other way to make money? How does Friends Inc. run a cafe to earn funds without dragging out kids wearing a giant CHILD PROSTITUTE sign around their necks?

Is the only way to continue these programs to lie about the actors featured and produce poverty porn? Is that the kind of NGO that should be operating in the Kingdom? What's preventing an honest NGO taking over the much maligned and criticized profit-earning "orphanage" sector that Sunrise operates in, if Sunrise were to close?
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by juansweetpotato »

ot mien kampf wrote:
juansweetpotato wrote:
ot mien kampf wrote:
juansweetpotato wrote:
ot mien kampf wrote:
So being a child prostitute steals the innocence of a girl, but calling a girl a child prostitute for the world to see causes no damage at all? There's no disclaimer saying she's a paid actor.

This ad is another case of self righteous people thinking the ends justify the means because they imagine their cause to be worthy. They sure have no compunction misleading poverty stricken Khmer for a dollar, using her image as a way of earning money, and then telling us it's fine because the Khmer get a small cut... similar to the pimps they campaign against.
I think it depends on whether the 1000+ kids would get helped if they didn't run ad campaigns like that. Otherwise, I would have to agree with you.BUT If it means that 1000 kids suffer because one child has her photo linked with prostitution then it seems an easy call to make.

Incidentally, they must have kids that are not actors that have had bad things happen to them. Should they be photographing those kids instead? Or is that worse?
If a mother pimps out one kid to feed 10 other children, is that an "easy call to make"?

Harming one child to benefit a few more?
That's an extreme analogy don't you think? From a healthy child being photographed and used in a fund raising campaign to a real child sex/ physical abuse victim being helped by people who took the time to care. It reminds me of Curb your Enthusiasm when a surviver from the TV show meets a surviver of the Nazi concentration camps. The guy fro the TV show wasn't backing down lol.

Like I said before, would it be better if the used a real victims photo? Or stayed away from that kind of advertising and had to close their programs down or severely restrict the amount of kids they help?
These programs can only work by exposing either an actual prostitute or calling a child actor a prostitute, there's literally no other way to make money? How does Friends Inc. run a cafe to earn funds without dragging out kids wearing a giant CHILD PROSTITUTE sign around their necks

Is the only way to continue these programs to lie about the actors featured and produce poverty porn? Is that the kind of NGO that should be operating in the Kingdom? What's preventing an honest NGO taking over the much maligned and criticized profit-earning "orphanage" sector that Sunrise operates in, if Sunrise were to close?
That's an interesting point. I think there is a definite distinction between orphanages that steal all the money donated and offer the kids nothing and orphanages with outreach programs that use the vast amount of the money donated on the kids. They both use "bad" advertising. I wish they could raise a lot of money without doing it, but I suspect they have found out the hard way what works best.


Geraldine Cox was saying that she used to raise the money (she didn't say how) before she employed a fund raiser. She said she was getting too old and more or less saying she didn't have the energy to do it anymore.

I would be suspicious too if they were found to be lying in one area. Why not other areas too? But do some aid suppliers lie in their advertising but not in other areas?

In the end it's a case of NEI- not enough information. I wouldn't like to bet any real money on it.
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by mammothboy2 »

THE JOLIE COMMANDOES are actively rescuing reptiles:

http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/r ... -305012409
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by Anchor Moy »

mammothboy2 wrote:THE JOLIE COMMANDOES are actively rescuing reptiles:

http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/r ... -305012409
A reminder that there are all sorts of NGOs at work on a lot of projects not considered "sexy" (as in easy to sell to overseas donors with photos of starving kids), like digging latrines and vaccination programmes, and they get on with their work. Some NGOs are saving turtles. Others get quietly arrested while trying to preserve the environment and save the forests.

As for those rescued turtles and lizards, some were already cut up ready to eat. Too late for them. :evil:
Pailin province Forestry Administration official Min Ravuth said Sem was released later in the day after paying a fine. Ravuth declined to disclose the size of the fine.
Transparency reigns.
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by mammothboy2 »

Maybe you all read this ...

http://www.newsweek.com/2014/05/30/soma ... 51642.html

... but it IS worth reading
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by LTO »

Related to the OP's question, perhaps the entire model is flawed.

"It became clear to me that we couldn’t give out fish, nor could we teach people how to fish. We had to help Cambodia build its own fishing industry. We needed to build a profession."
When To Stop Helping Cambodia?

The goal of NGOs in Cambodia should be to hand over work to local organizations and government, but few really do this and the cycle of dependency just continues, argues Weh Yeoh.

In countries like Australia, the United States or across Europe, you often see images of suffering on TV. Children who are unable to go to school, people who are fleeing persecution or natural disasters. Our first instincts are to help.

The next instinct should be to ask: How do we know when to stop? Three years after starting OIC: The Cambodia Project that will establish speech therapy in Cambodia, we now know how we’re going to get out of Cambodia, and cease to exist.

Let’s take a step back.

In 2012, I arrived in Cambodia and began working with a local non-government organization called Capacity Building for Disability Cooperation or CABDICO. They ride motorbikes for hours along dusty roads visiting children with all backgrounds and abilities to provide basic services like physiotherapy and special education. In these villages, there are no health centers and no hospitals.

Through CABDICO, I met Ling, a child who slurred his speech and hence could not go to school. My CABDICO colleagues were at a loss as how to help Ling – they didn’t have any knowledge in speech therapy. Not only this, there was not one single Cambodian speech therapist in country.

Without speech therapy, children like Ling were being left behind.

This meant that hundreds of thousands of people, especially children, could not communicate to their full potential. Either they could not talk clearly, or at all, or could not process incoming communication.

An equally large number of people had difficulties swallowing, where food and liquid would enter their lungs, instead of the stomach. They could contract pneumonia and then die. Without speech therapy, these people were dying young.

Upon learning this, I felt a mixture of isolation and helplessness. If the big organizations, including the United Nations, were not doing anything about this issue, what could one person possibly do?

Over several months, I talked to many people to learn what had already happened. Afterwards, I sat down and laid out the options.

Ling needed speech therapy to get into school now, so I could organize for some volunteer speech therapists to come from my home country of Australia. This would be relatively easy to do. Speech therapists back home would jump at the opportunity to fly to Cambodia and be of service.

But children often need speech therapy for months, if not years, and while that might help Ling, what would the long-term impact in Cambodia be? We’d be giving a man a fish.

Okay, I thought. I could organize for volunteers to come and train my CABDICO colleagues. They could then use their new skills with children like Ling.

Under this model, we’re teaching a man to fish.

But these volunteers had minimal understanding of local context, and after they left, what happens next? What happens when local people changed jobs, moved on or had families? What happens to the knowledge then?

This model had been going on in Cambodia for at least 15 years, and there was still no university course or government policy on speech therapy, let alone awareness of the need.

It became clear to me that we couldn’t give out fish, nor could we teach people how to fish. We had to help Cambodia build its own fishing industry. We needed to build a profession.

I have to admit that when I first started articulating this vision, I didn’t know how we were going to get there. But I did have a few key principles in mind. We would not start an NGO.

The goal of NGOs in Cambodia should be to hand over work to local organizations and government. And yet, NGOs are not set up to achieve this. It’s in the NGO’s best interests to keep on justifying its existence.

For example, let’s say an NGO was set up to give every Cambodian a widget. Once it achieved this aim, the organization would be redundant. Donations would drop off and people would lose jobs. This isn’t in the best interests of the NGO.

I didn’t want to set up an NGO because it would make it harder to dissolve it when we reached our goal. We would push for maximum Cambodian government ownership from the beginning.

This means not setting up a hospital or clinic to deliver free speech therapy services. Despite the immediate need, I didn’t want us to create something to eventually hand over to government. I’d rather government took as much on as possible from day one.

With the help of some wonderful people, we started to set up OIC: The Cambodia Project. The project part of the name is important, because we set up a project that sat under the parent organization, CABDICO.

When OIC delivers what it sets out to do, the project ends. And we all go home. What we are trying to achieve is articulated in our vision: Speech therapy is led by Cambodians and available to all who need it in Cambodia.

This is inspirational, it’s aspirational, it’s clear. However, the reality is that OIC cannot be around to see this through. It’s unlikely we’ll get there in your or my lifetime, especially when we don’t yet have one speech therapist.

So, what is our exit point from Cambodia? When do we know that the job is done?

A hundred speech therapists employed by government by the year 2030. By this stage, there are multiple university courses, there is government policy and buy in and there is awareness and job creation. There may not be enough therapists to cover the whole country, but there is enough for the government to take over and keep going.

By 2030, OIC may not have achieved its vision, but it will have achieved something that can be continued by government. OIC will no longer be needed, and will exit Cambodia.

When I met Ling, I felt an immediate desire to help. I wanted to help him speak more clearly and go to school. That commitment hasn’t wavered. But in helping him, I never wanted OIC to lose sight of the bigger picture. To set up a solution which is not only Cambodian-owned, but also Cambodian-led.

By working out when we were going to stop, we’re on our way there. Hopefully we can achieve something with a long-term vision, while not forgetting those who need our help now.

What’s Ling up to now? Due to our pilot project, he’s attending school for the first time. But he’s not just attending, he’s excelling. Ling is coming second in his class.

Weh Yeoh was born in Australia in the 1980s. His grandparents moved from China to the then British Malaya to escape the Great Famine, and his parents later left Malaysia and settled in Australia. He founded OIC: The Cambodia Project in 2013.

http://www.khmertimeskh.com/news/26056/ ... cambodia-/
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by mammothboy2 »

Now that BoJo is - amazingly - the British Foreign Minister, it will interest some here to know what he had to say abut aid, AIDS, colonialism and Uganda over a decade ago

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/ ... guilt-trip
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Re: NGO's more harm than good? Or more good than harm?

Post by juansweetpotato »

mammothboy2 wrote:Now that BoJo is - amazingly - the British Foreign Minister, it will interest some here to know what he had to say abut aid, AIDS, colonialism and Uganda over a decade ago

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/ ... guilt-trip
Teach a man to fish, and he will take any money thats going and get drunk and sit on his ass. Teach a man to exploit and he will actively exploit. Of course not everyone sits on their ass, and not everyone exploits in the way the British taught them to do. But there is a lot more money in exploiting than running a small boat, or working for one. I liked the bit about the fact that there are so many organisations that have sprung up to "help" (Uganda Centre for the Development of Marginalised Children; Kampala School for the Physically Handicapped; Send a Cow Uganda; Uganda Network of Aids Service Organisations; Centre for African Development Initiatives; the Uganda Women's Finance Trust for the Economic Empowerment of Women in Uganda etc etc etc). A lot of them manned by one single person sitting in their organisation head office (shack), hoping to get rich by an ad taken out in the Guardian.
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