Who Profits Off of NGOs in the Middle East?
Oxfam presence in South Sudan. Photo courtesy of Petterik Wiggers.
There are 3,901 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) registered with the Arab NGO Directory, which purports to be the “largest and most concise” database of such organizations based in the Middle East. This figure, however, underestimates the complicated web of tens of thousands of NGOs that plunge in and out of the region regularly, making it difficult to classify and quantify their nature and operations, be they from the Levant or the Arabian Peninsula. In Egypt alone, there are about 52,000 registered NGOs. Situated in contexts of conflict, large-scale social unrest, and ineffective governance, they tend to assume a quasi-governmental function, filling in the gaps in social service provision created by dysfunctional state apparatuses. Alongside Islamic organizations in so-called weak states, such as Syria and Lebanon, they work as institutions parallel to those of states with limited legitimacy to rule.
NGOs perform activities that very often go beyond simple aid and social service provision in the Middle East. They can reinforce the democratic dimensions of civil society and advocate for compliance with human rights requirements. However, while offering aid and life support to vulnerable populations, their capacity is often severely hindered when and where they are most needed, as evidenced by the ongoing civil war in Sudan. Moreover, authoritarian governments obstruct their ability to provide while simultaneously claiming credit for services and capitalizing on their existence. NGOs in the Middle East are therefore at once indispensable and ineffective; exploited and underutilized; competitive and stagnant. Some analysts underscore how these NGOs unleash tides of democratization. For others, they are a reminder of colonial infringements on sovereignty and independence. As such, they must be radically restructured to function for the benefit of their targeted populations. Without doing so, they lack both popular support and utility.
Categorization and Nuance
This apparent contradiction in perceptions stems primarily from the fact that there is no single category of NGOs that comprise civil society. Between International NGOs (INGOs) and local NGOs with foreign ties to government-organized NGOs (GONGOs), the plurality of acronyms paints a tableau of continuous exchange between non-state actors, governments, and citizens.
The one undeniable reality is that NGOs are far from marginal actors. But in order to understand who actually benefits from their work, it is necessary to comprehend the heterogeneity of their forms to determine how they can operate without detrimental interference. Similarly, to evaluate their efficacy, it is vital to avoid categorizing the Middle East as a monolith, as the challenges they encounter are vastly different depending on where and at what scale they are operating. For one type of NGO to be singled out as a solution, the NGO problem—inefficacy, insufficiency, and illegitimacy—must be taken into account in all its forms.
The Paradox of Pointing Fingers
During a National Security Council meeting on May 6, 2024, President Kais Saied of Tunisia described civil society organizations as “traitors,” “[foreign] agents,” and “trumpets driven by foreign wages” because they receive foreign funding. Such crackdowns against civil society organizations are ongoing and certainly not limited to Tunisia. Political leaders in the Middle East frequently accuse NGOs of meddling in the internal affairs of their country even after encouraging the revitalization of NGOs in the post-Arab Uprising period. Arguing that they pursue agendas of neocolonial exploitation, leaders voice their distrust of foreign-funded NGOs and instrumentalize such discourse to keep civil society’s human rights organizations and good governance groups in check. They minimize dissent against their regimes by also using the fact that NGOs rely on international funding. Once again this forms a vicious cycle. Facing restrictive laws such as Egypt’s Law 153 of 1999—which sharply impedes freedom of association—NGOs are forced to adapt certain aspects of their structure to qualify for international loans and grants, such as hiring internationally educated English-speaking foreigners for key positions. The process of the government manipulating such characteristics then distorts and discredits the image of NGOs in the eyes of the public. Given the region’s history with imposed borders and struggles for independence, rhetoric skeptical of Western and foreign intervention does have some political potency.
After all, it is no secret that aid and funding are necessarily political affairs. Foreign funding has always been instrumentalized by international actors to signal support for certain causes over others. Additionally, there are diplomatic strategies attached to development aid that benefit the national interest of the providing country. For example, China selected Syria to receive emergency humanitarian assistance because Beijing perceived that forging diplomatic relations with Syria in a publicized manner would later facilitate its foreign policy objectives, such as expanding Chinese outreach in the Global South and challenging the United States. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is similarly not exempt from similar desires to express soft power. This was best captured by Andrew Natsios, former USAID administrator under George W. Bush, who once told Foreign Policy magazine: “I don’t think [the general public] understand[s] what the role of USAID is, what USAID’s mission directors are. USAID’s mission directors are among the most influential foreigners in the country.” Given such reputations and perceptions of foreign humanitarian involvement, it becomes easy to blur the distinctions between international organizations, aid providers, and foreign-funded NGOs. No wonder that the last two decades have witnessed 39 of the world’s 153 low and middle-income countries adopting laws that restrict the flow of foreign aid to domestic NGOs.
The great irony in the tempestuous relations between the government and NGOs comes from the fact that these governments depend on international recognition to keep their regimes alive. This generates an even more entangled map of dependence that further complicates the NGO scene. The term “Republic of NGOs,” often used in conjunction with Arab states which are governed by NGOs instead of their governments, is evidently an outcome of this phenomenon. While the presence of NGOs and their vocal endorsement of human rights discourse threaten the stability of their host government’s rule, they also have symbolic value that paints the image of a prosperous domestic civil society. Paradoxically, NGOs also appear as the sole actors in the vacuum left by the government, while also highlighting its shortage of political and financial accountability. What emerges is a system in the Middle East that is wholly unprepared to tackle the demands reproduced by the incessant crises––from civil war to economic decline—it faces.
The tangible cost of this smoke-and-mirrors game is the abandonment of the domestic population when they are in the most danger. This was especially pertinent in 2024, when every nine out of ten children living in the Gaza Strip experienced severe food poverty and 500,000 Gazans suffered from “catastrophic hunger,” much of which was directly caused by the inability of humanitarian civil society groups to access the starving. In Sudan, the UNHCR has recently declared that approximately 25 million Sudanese are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance due to the unprecedented deterioration of the violent civil war. There is pressing urgency for flows of humanitarian assistance, but there never seems to be enough, because of these legitimacy-related issues.
Is there a way out?
The solution to the “NGO problem” in the Middle East must be two-fold: re-localizing NGO operations and bolstering their organizational capacity to finance their own operations. To do so, the role of the international community does not necessarily have to diminish, but substantial restructuring is undeniably necessary. Instead of trying to devise top-down or short-term project-based solutions with only the inputs of international staff, the specific lenses of localized stakeholders can and should be included. More representation from the bottom-up in international NGOs offers a way out of this complicated knot of dependence.
In practice, this can take the form of channeling aid and grants to local organizations, long-term investment in capacity-building, and handing out some responsibilities to local actors. Some agencies, such as Oxfam, have already committed themselves to utilizing such practices. Although some have criticized “localization” due to allegedly cost-ineffective performance and the need for further bureaucratic diversification, in terms of efficiency, it is more logical to shrink the complex managerial hierarchy in exchange for a mechanism that directly deals with funding arrangements. In addition, refocusing on local NGOs also spends less resources on finding suitable staff with the cultural knowledge, networks, and outreach needed to address the situation. They can act as the established intermediaries between the government, citizens, and civil society in a way that international NGOs cannot.
Looking at this bottom-up approach from a simple monetary perspective, the consequence of differences in purchasing power parity alone can make a difference in how much the donor organization will be paying for the staff. On the other hand, it is true that for NGOs that heavily rely on voluntary international contributions, such as UNICEF, especially from foreign governments and private individuals, similarities in language and accessibility to the organization can become a large motivating factor in determining the level of donation. Put simply, the perceived permissibility of operations and faith in NGO activity becomes easier to establish when these partnerships are overseen by NGO personnel that can communicate in the same language. Yet, this does not necessitate a management structure that completely alienates the local population.
Rather than simply directing large chunks of money to local NGOs that allocate them in a rather opaque manner and receive public scrutiny for being “foreign-funded,” international humanitarian agencies should provide financial assistance to increase the technical skills and human capital of the domestic workforce—particularly the segment of the population that already has done deep-rooted mitigation work on crises they themselves are personally impacted by. Doing so would enable long-term capacities to self-finance and rely less on funding in the first place.
To consolidate public trust, social movements, social capital, and a “civic culture”—all of which are necessary for the consolidation of peace and democracy—academic literature has shown that horizontal organizations, with little middle-level management, are key. Defined as norms of reciprocity between individuals by political scientist Robert Putnam, social capital enables the formation of a civic culture by strengthening interpersonal trust. Bureaucratic hierarchies imposed in many NGO structures not only prevent these from organically developing but also bubble worlds such that NGO operations are largely separate from the activities of domestic voluntary organizations. Such a division is counterproductive because it heightens the tensions between the government and the NGOs—ultimately resulting in the deliberate barricading of aid and assistance at times of peak conflict. One way to replace this with mutual trust is by allocating resources to support the work of cost-efficient local NGOs, instead of spending already narrow budgets on importing high-paid international specialists or organizing lavish conferences. The recent steps taken by Oxfam to localize reveal that this is feasible. Establishing itself in global discourse, the goal “to enable more locally-led response[s]” in humanitarian action is further reinforced with initiatives such as the Charter for Change.
Those who profit off of NGOs in the Middle East are rarely ever those who should. Those who do benefit from their presence, on the other hand, are most often the governments in power that aim to debilitate them, or international actors with foreign policy stakes in the country. Consequently, the goal of establishing a resolute and dynamic civil society in war-torn or weakly governed Arab states has long been a distant dream. It requires one fundamental tenet that has been missing until now: financial longevity with a degree of localized independence. Even though some international agencies have started to recognize the importance of “localization,” they have not done enough to bring about the long-term transformation towards self-sufficiency and increased human capital of the populations they are targeting.
To attain this, international organizations operating in the Middle East, in all of their forms, must enfranchise grassroots movements and voices into the heart of their work. The principal hurdle in their way—chronic underfunding—can be overcome with a strategic redistribution of staff and resources, as well as reevaluated relations with the government. Only then can they produce ties with, and garner support from, the locals they are working with. With intensifying transnationalization engendered by globalization, it is certain that NGOs' centrality as viable non-state actors in both local and global governance will remain. Thus, when their presence is required more than ever to prevent wide-scale suffering in the Middle East, they must urgently reconsider their strategies. We must place the necessary emphasis on their reform and revitalization—before they are deemed irrelevant by the very populations they were founded to serve.
Lara Harmankaya (GS ’27) is a staff writer at CPR from Istanbul, Turkey in the Dual Degree with Sciences Po Paris’s Menton campus. She looks forward to a future of research, especially relating to foreign policy, climate justice, and the political economy. You can reach her at clh2212@columbia.edu.