Behind the Curtain: The Dark Side of NGOs in Refugee Crises.

• Dayan Ejaz
• Dec 6, 2024
• 3 min read

Want those fancy resumes? Be an intern at an NGO, go to those refugee sites, meet those marginalized people, deceive them into actually helping out and your social media will look like this then.

Yes, we are talking about the truth about NGOs, international organizations and those volunteers who work under them not for the sake of helping those who are displaced, but for adorning their resumes and securing that dream school/job. The existing narratives on these NGOS and international organizations portray the good side of their work. Whereas, in fact they plague the system and focus more on the short term benefits over long term. The short term benefits include providing relief to the masses, integrating them back to the society and arranging funds for those displaced. This seems imperative for an emergency situation but the real problem lies in the long term.

NGOs prioritize quick, visible results and a media presence over the sustainable solutions like skill building, education opportunities and thriving environment that are done at the expense of long term solutions. The lack of culturally sensitive programs and language barriers doesn’t align with the local customs hence it provides a resistance in the response process, alienates the refugees and enforces a whole new system upon them. This further connects with how the NGOs undermine local governments. The local organization are subverted by the much richer international NGOs, who have no know how of the area. What that does is, people lose trust and ignore the efforts of local government which weakens the credibility and capacity of government. We have an example of the Haiti documentary that showed how when the NGO workers came, they took charge of the situation and pushed aside the local humanitarian workers already working there. This speaks much about the savior complex or more commonly known as the White Savior Complex, which explains how the individuals who are more privileged deem it as a duty to save those who are marginalized or less privileged, believing in themselves as only capable of saving those in less fortunate situations. Relating it to the refugee situation, the western dominated NGOs have a motive that serves them more than the refugees. They see the local government as defeated or incapable of helping their people, so they practice their powers over them. This pressurizes the government and the economy as NGOs inadvertently contributes to inflation in local markets by driving up prices of goods and services. This strips off the local government from policy-making powers. All those NGOs make an annual report that are very glossy but doesn’t include their accounts of where they find the money and show everyone what they are doing. A lot money laundering and corruption cases, as we saw in India documentary, are present where they acquire the money for the operations and providing relief but that isn’t reflected in their efforts.

This becomes all in all a matter of personal benefits and who suffers the most are those refugees who are already on the brink of falling into the traps of death. The seemingly “neutral” stance of international organizations get exposed in the media, where it is apparent how the placement of NGOs or international organizations depend on state’s political motives. The influx of UN’s refugee camps and aid in Ukraine, and almost non-existent relief in Gaza, explains much about how the matter is more of a political and not humanitarian.