Relieving Bloatedness

blind over the toothpaste

My colleague and friend Alan Fowler, an English intellectual who lives on a ranch in South Africa and divides his time between crops and their international consultancy, I got a few months ago on a new adventure: writing on NGOs and Communication for his book NGO Management, which was recently published in Europe, published in collaboration with Chiku Malunga.

Alan Fowler Alan Fowler

and I, along with Dominique Hounkonnou of Benin, Louk de la Rive Box in Holland and Vasanti Rao India, are members of the International Advisory Council PSO, a Dutch organization for cooperation, specializing in capacity building of civil society organizations in developing countries. PSO has given us the opportunity to meet each year in The Hague to discuss among ourselves and with the PSO personnel, development issues, international cooperation, civil society and media.

The chapter I wrote for this new book by Alan Fowler and Chiku Malunga, "NGOs and Communications: divorce over the toothpaste" (ie, "NGOs and the media: divorce by the toothpaste ") can read files Scribd or A.nnotate , and you can purchase the entire book publisher ordered from Earthscan , which also has a catalog special for those interested in the social sciences.

Beyond my analysis of poverty or lack of communication in the internal and external work of NGOs, and Fowler's book contains Malunga in more than 450 pages 30 contributions from 40 authors from universities, research institutes and NGOs from Europe and North America and some in Africa, Asia and Australia. It seems I'm the only Latin American in the package and one of eight new texts premiered in the book.

The chapters address the problem from multiple angles of NGOs in the world of development and social change. To this end the authors have divided the book into nine parts, each with two or more texts, through which it covers the full spectrum of work of NGOs as organized spaces of interaction in civil society. The main parts dealing relations between NGOs and civil society, strategies, approaches and applications, organizational development, performance and forms to evaluate them, leadership, learning paths, and sustainability.

Although much written and published nationally and internationally on the world of NGOs, and in all languages, the fact is that very few books with the intention to cover everything, that is, from a reading guide (a "reader" they say in English) that can address all aspects, including communication, which is very rare in the literature on NGOs (which the authors prefer to call NGOs, adding a "D" for development differentiate them from those who only come in emergencies for humanitarian work.
The introduction
compilers of the book placed the issues that have not been sufficiently addressed in individual chapters, for example help to clarify the issue of identity of non-governmental development and the challenges they face in terms of political economy , and the pursuit of efficiency and transparency.

NGOs often operate with excessive confidence, as if they were untouchable and unquestionable, as if the original basis (at birth) was sufficient to justify all their actions. This book is a space for collective reflection shows that the initial good intentions that animate most of the NGOs development can be debated and questioned as is happening now in Haiti (see article in Blanche Petrich La Jornada), and that the NGOs or if you want NGDOs should be the time to reflect internally and self-critical look their actions.