“The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. It’s increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest … Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.”
Wall Street Journal, 2009

“[T]here will always be groups in the global South willing and able to do a Northern funder’s bidding”
Okeoma Iba, 2014

“We’re not dealing with civil society members but paid
political activists who are trying to help foreign interests here.”
Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary

In their 2005 study of non-governmental organisations, academics Oliver Richmond and Henry Carey recorded that there may have been just over 1,000 official NGOs at the start of the last century. There has been an exponential growth in NGOs since then, particularly within Africa. Professor David Lewis, of the London School of Economics, noted in 2009 that “It is difficult to know precisely how many NGOs there are, because few comprehensive or reliable statistics are kept. Some estimates put the figure at a million organizations, if both formal and informal organizations are included, while the number of registered NGOs receiving international aid is probably closer to ‘a few hundred thousand.’” The phenomenal expansion of non-governmental organisations within Africa, and elsewhere within the developing world, can be seen as coinciding with decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1967, the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) compiled the ‘Directory Development Aid of Non-Governmental Non-Profit Organisations’. This was followed by ICVA’s 1968 publication, Repertory of Africa’s NGOs, which provided a snapshot of activity by 1,839 NGOs within nearly and newly independent African states. The NGO landscape has transformed enormously since decolonisation. NGOs are now bigger, vastly more numerous and receive billions of dollars in funding.

John Keane observed in 2003 that there were around 50,000 international NGOs operating at the global level, almost all of which had been formed since 1970. Firoze Manji and Carl O’Coill’s 2002 article in International Affairs refers to the ‘explosive growth’ in the number of Western and local NGOs in Africa. The Mail and Guardian, for example, reports that there are now over 140 000 registered NGOs within South Africa alone. There are reported to be 8,587 British NGOs working in Sub-Saharan Africa, receiving £8 billion in funding. There are, of course, several sorts of NGO. There are also a variety of acronyms with regard to non-governmental organisations. Thomas Weiss and Leon Gordenker have identified four types including “quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organisations” (QUANGOS), donor-created NGOs (DONGOS) and GONGOs, a “government-created, nongovernmental organization . . . a front for administrative activities” used by the United States. Michael Edwards and David Hulme differentiate between “international NGOs with their headquarters in the North (Northern NGOs, such as Save the Children UK); intermediary NGO’s in the South . . . who support grassroots work through funding, technical advice and advocacy); and grassroots organizations of various kinds in the South . . . which are controlled by their own members”. Some NGOs also style themselves NPOs (non-profit organizations), CSOs (civil society organizations), GROs (grassroots organizations), INGOs (international non-governmental organizations), CBOs (community-based organizations), SNGOs ([global] South non-governmental organizations), and NNGOs ([global] North non-governmental organizations).

The political philosopher and academic Zbigniew Pełczyńskinoted of the term “civil society” that“few social and political concepts have travelled so far in their life and changed their meaning so much”. It was of course the Italian philosopher and activist Antonio Gramsci who saw civil society is a potential “ideological battleground”. He could not have envisaged how apt his reading of civil society would have been when seen against the unprecedented attempts by the Global North to artificially expand, populate, fund, direct and weaponise “civil society” in its own image within the developing world.