Blog Post 4 - Elise Coakley

For my fourth blog post, I wanted to write about a particular article that we read for class, followed by a discussion we had in class regarding NGO's. NGO's, or Non-Governmental Organizations, are groups that are founded with the intention to help groups of people outside of that government body. The issues they tackle include human rights violations, poverty, environment, and other injustices. This is all well and good, when the NGO's are honest and are helping those who want to be helped. However, after our discussion in class, and the article by Sebastian Mallaby, I am far more skeptical about the general concept of NGO's than I was prior to learning more.

The Mallaby article brings to light how NGO's can be harmful through their "framing" tactics, which we also discussed in class. Framing can be a useful tool to present information to make it more accessible to the average reader. Rather than confront an audience with an overload of facts and data, framing allows the author to get the intended message across in a simpler way. This can be harmful when the framing lacks concrete data or evidence to back it up, or when it becomes overly simplified and misses the point entirely. For example, in class we looked at infographics about whales, and the intention was to get the audience to find pity for the whales and feel encouraged, and maybe a little obligated out of guilt, to help save the whales. The way the infographics were framed, however, lacked any factual evidence and instead targeted the individual reader's conscience. 

NGO's commonly use framing tactics to garner support for a specific cause, and yet many of these causes are unfounded or not desired by the local people that they are intending to help. In Mallaby's article, he discusses efforts to halt the building of a dam in Uganda by Western NGO's. The basis of the NGO's claims were that the dam would negatively affect the local population near where the dam was to be built. In reality, however, the local population was overwhelmingly in support of the dam, because the locals were going to be given monetary compensation to aid in moving them. Thus, the NGO's were actually doing more harm than good, but it took Mallaby an in-person trip to interview members of the population to discover the truth.

I think overall, NGO's can be beneficial. However, I think it is also very easy to be manipulated and fall victim to this type of "savior complex" and assume that all NGO's are working for the people, when often they may not be. For one, NGO's are non-governmnetal organizations, which means that they must be sponsored somehow. I would find it likely that these NGO's would have to work in favor of their sponsors wants and desires, rather than hep the people directly without influence. Second, it is hard to know when the information you are consuming is reliable and trustworthy, particularly in today's age. The fact that it took Mallaby an in-person trip to Uganda to uncover the truth is alarming, and we can't always have that luxury of someone else going to fact check for us. But then what happens when we have no one fact checking for us? It seems worrisome to me that we cannot trust what the NGO's are telling us, and yet we also cant fly to these local communities and figure out whats true and whats not for ourselves, so how do we know if an NGO is legitimate in its cause?

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