Aid, NGOs and the Realities of Women's Lives : A perfect storm

This book explores how international NGOs are navigating these rapid changes, changes that challenge their role and legitimacy, their values, and their overall purpose. It calls for a re-examination of theories about change, and a re-focus on ideas of complexity and feminism and on learning from past NGO experience.

Aid organizations have their origins in a desire to help the world’s poorest and most marginalized people – but are they reaching these people? Factors are coming together that put pressure on NGOs working in development: the economic crisis, the growing conditionality of aid, and increased competition for funding between NGOs. This creates ‘a perfect storm’ driven by a new language of aid, policies and procedures leaving poor women behind. This book explores how international NGOs are navigating these rapid changes that challenge their role and legitimacy, values, and overall purpose. The writers see a crisis for NGOs as they are pulled further from those they claim to work with; they also explore alternative ways of conceptualizing development, and of bringing about improvements for the most marginalized and increasingly ‘unheard’ women. This book is essential reading for development practitioners and those working on women’s rights, as well as NGO staff , researchers, and students of development studies.