In a recent post, Owen blog recalls and amplifies Alanna Shaikh list of some situations on which NGO can unintentionally do harm to the community it’s trying to serve. A summary to invite you to read the original post:
1. Initiate projects with little chance of success.
2. Make communities outsider-dependents.
3. Destabilize community power structures (reinforcing inequitable existent power structures or creating internal tensions)
4. Build and leave without money for maintenance or staff.
5. Take the best people out of the country's system (so they do good in your project but then become unwelcome in the government)
6. Getting personally too influential, so leaders become accountable to the organization, not to the population.
The author claims that these are equally applicable to donors as well as multilateral organizations.
What do you think?