FRANCAISNorwegian Church Aid - Comments
8) The institutional learning
-At the beginning, the Norwegian Church Relief self-evaluates its programmes on an ad hoc basis, according to circumstances. In Nigeria, for instance, one of its collaborators, Håkon Anstad, comes back to review an agricultural project in Ikwo ten years after it was closed in 1977. Not much remains of the organisations’ efforts, except the development of rice production. In 2003, NCA then launches an evaluation from its partners’ perspective in Central America, South Asia and Eastern and Southern Africa. But the results are not fully published and it is not an independent external global review of the organisation. As far as we know, NCA never produced a critical document on its programmes and the harmful effects of aid in war-torn countries. In general, the organisation seems to pay little attention to internal democracy, transparency and accountability of its local partners: struggle against apartheid in South Africa and cross-border operations from Sudan into Northern Ethiopia are significant in this regard. In 2002 and 2003, again, fraudulent employees embezzled large amounts of money in NCA’s office in Khartoum.
-As a matter of fact, few reports have been published on NCA and external evaluation is still at a very early stage. Revealed by the Akha Heritage Foundation, the sex scandal of the NGO’s staff in Laos is quite telling in this regard. In April 2006, an internal review by NCA first refuted the allegations of rapes. Two months later, the investigation commissioned by the funding agency NORAD (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation) also exculpated the NGO from possible complicity in a cycle of sexual exploitation. It argued that transgressions were not systematic, did not qualify as rape and did not allow to identify the aid workers by name or employer. One of the main witnesses interviewed by the Akha Heritage Foundation was simply dismissed as being an alcoholic “prone to exaggeration” and known “for abusing other villagers regularly with derogatory and manufactured accusations”. Conducted by Kristin Ingebrigtsen and Chris Lyttleton, the report concluded that there was “no evidence of systematic rape” and suggested that the allegations relied “on partial knowledge and exaggerated claims”. Yet it estimated that the demands for sex by NGOs and Government development staff could reach 2-3 times per month and per village: a quite significant pattern given the small number of unmarried teenage females in a community of 14,000 inhabitants distributed in 60 villages. For many outsiders, the investigation process raised doubts and the Akha Heritage Foundation challenged its independence. An anthropologist from Australia, Dr. Chris Lyttleton had consulted for NCA in the past, while Kristin Ingebrigtsen worked for Save the Children Norway. None of them spoke akha and they spent only a few days in the villages. Moreover, they didn’t give information on how they selected the respondents, protected their security and recorded their interviews. In another study, notes Eisel Mazard, Chris Lyttleton had written about “widespread coercion and prostitution” in Akhaland in 2004. But in 2006, he found “unlikely” threats to young girls. His arguments were disturbing. First, he claimed that it was difficult to identify who really worked with the NGO. The very same person who visited a village was at one point a Government official, and a week later a NCA contractor. Actually, this problem only showed the lack of supervision of the programmes, with no foreign staff, and the compromise of an NGO which paid the salaries of a communist regime and sometimes transported in its vehicles security personnel at the request of the military or the police. Even more sordid was the argument according to which customary practices explained sexual intercourses. Because it did not want to consider the whole sexual system of the Akha as abusive, the investigation team could not find any victims of abuse! As a result, writes Eisel Mazard, NCA defended employees buying sexual intercourse with children under 17 years old. Instead of condemning a form of coercive exploitation which implied giving money to obtain girls, the NGO refused to accept any responsibility for past wrongs. It did not show any contrition or regret, even if Kristin Ingebrigtsen and Chris Lyttleton acknowledged at least two cases concerning NCA staff, one of them resulting in pregnancy and involving an education coordinator who was removed from the project in 2002 and who abandoned the mother-to-be.
