How NGOS can help governments in the global south to learn

One of the main roles for NGOs is as “learning labs” for governments, a senior INGO leader told a Devex event on Tuesday. Jennifer Schechter, chief executive of Integrate Health, said that NGOs can take risks and develop knowledge in ways that governments cannot. If those NGOs have good relationships with governments in the global south, then they can share what they have learned and help governments adopt it as standard practice. “As NGOs, we’re uniquely positioned to take risks that our government partners can’t,” Schechter said during the Impact House event. “We can leverage philanthropic capital, and then we combine that relationship and the risk to do learning. And by learning, I mean answering the questions that our government partners have. Not learning what we want to learn or what our funders want to learn.” She described how Integrate Health had worked in Togo to help the government make maternal health care free of charge. She said the organization had a three-step approach it calls “Chunk it, cost it, test it,” which involves isolating a specific package of work, identifying the associated costs, and testing the policy options. “We worked through the kinks and the government took that approach and rolled it out nationally,” she said. She said that this model could be replicated by others. “This is an approach that any NGO can take, and that we believe all NGOs should be taking,” she said. It was vital to take a partnership approach — to start by asking governments what challenges they were facing, and what questions they wanted to answer, she added. These relationships are just like any [other] relationships,” she said. “They’re built on trust and patience, but we have to take the initiative. I think the onus is on NGOs to signal that we want to work through a real relationship, that we want to listen, that we’re there to support.” “And that signaling goes a long way, because that’s not always the mentality that an NGO brings into a room or a meeting with their government partners.” She talked about the need for NGOs to collaborate to best meet the needs of governments. Having too many NGOs doing different things created a “management burden” for governments, she said. “Competition does not serve anyone,” she said. “It doesn’t serve the NGOs, and it doesn’t serve our government partners.” “So I’m optimistic. I think the era of NGOs fighting over table scraps is in the past, and we’ve learned that we can have a huge impact when we collaborate. We can move mountains.”