How to tell fake NGOs apart from actual do-gooders? Here’s a guide.

livemint.com:

A friend from an NGO urged me to name the NGOs that were high on fakeness. Many others expressed similar sentiments after reading my last two columns on how funders have made the world of NGOs more fake and flaky. All put most of the onus of these trends on funders, not on the NGOs—big or small—that are pushed along the dimensions of fakeness and flakiness by individual funders and the dangerous momentum in this sector.

But they were scathing about a certain set of NGOs that are tapping these funder-led trends to position themselves as self-appointed guardians and guides (SAGs) of India’s social sector. Not only are they cornering a disproportionate share of the available funding for themselves, they also influence who else gets how much money. In some cases, they have become intermediaries.

Funders give them money and they in turn decide which NGOs to fund. This is called ‘on-granting.’ Equally if not more damaging is their influence on what is seen by funders and often also the wider public as good or bad work. For sure, all SAGs are not big, nor have all big NGOs become SAGs.

Nor is all ‘on-granting’ bad. SAGs are both big and small. Some do on-granting and some don’t.

Some of them work across the country and some dominate certain regions. Instead of taking names, let’s consider the five kinds of fakeness of these NGOs-turned-SAGs, including those aspiring to SAG-hood. The first two kinds of fakeness are deeply inter-related: the fakeness of scale and the fakeness of depth.

Often, this is about projecting the scale of your work as large, or as large as possible, through metrics and narratives which let you side-step the matter of the depth and intensity of that work. There are myriad examples of this. Here is one.