| Foreign donors and civil society organizations look at the future of democracy building |
| By Kate Durham |
| Compared to a revolution, democracy building is not very exciting stuff. Instead of stages and speeches in Tahrir Square, you have seminars and reports on human rights. While the January 25 Revolution exploded on the scene, democracy building has been quietly and slowly going on behind the scenes for decades. And like any other development project, it costs money. Many joke about foreigners buying KFC meals for the Tahrir protesters during the revolution, but the truth is that, in most cases, democracy building projects are indeed financially supported by international donors.Results have been mixed, with the previous government welcoming technical support through official channels, but pressuring donors to steer clear of civil society organizations that pushed too hard at the authoritarian system. For the NGOs, international assistance has been a double-edged sword, giving access to funds not forthcoming at home but leaving them open to charges of “foreign interference” from the regime and other political opponents. The fall of the Mubarak regime has changed the game, taking the pressure off the civil society organizations and opening new project opportunities for the agencies that fund democracy advocacy. But less pressure does not necessarily mean more foreign dollars or euros for NGOs. The goal, donors and NGOs say, is a civil society supported mainly by the local community. A Steady Trickle Perhaps not surprising, the demands of Tahrir Square — justice and human rights, free and open elections, transparency and an end to corruption — are the same goals of internationally funded democracy-building projects that have been in progress over the decades. Added to those demands are media independence, civil service reforms, civic education and local governance. The approach to achieving those goals, however, differs according to the agency funding the projects. (For details about the donors, see the “The Major Donors,” box on page 32.) Among the major donors, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)works almost solely with the Egyptian government on democracy-building projects, providing policy advice and technical support to ministries, national councils and other government agencies. UNDP Country Director Mounir Tabet explains that the focus on working with governmental partners comes from his agency’s mandate as part of the United Nations, answerable to the countries that form its membership. For the UNDP, that means operating through the official channels, advocating reform. “We work with the government of the day,” Tabet says. “We don’t associate ourselves with a specific ideology [or] a specific party. We work with the government that is governing the country.” The UNDP reaches out to civil society to help form its Human Development Reports, getting local input to form recommendations for new policies that will improve citizens’ lives. “[Our] work with government on policies and on programs makes them more amenable for implementation,” says Tabet. “We work with where [the] government is, not where [the] government ought to be. And you work with the actual context, not with the desirable context.” The “desirable context” is a society founded on the UN Charter of Human Rights, something Tabet says cannot be imposed from outside. “It is societal action and societal interaction, societal dynamics that sets both the pace, the degree and the extent to which it wants to adopt and work with these charter of human rights principles plus its own […] sources of moral, ethical, societal, religious principles as society evolves,” he explains. “Our role is to promote the idea, expose other countries’ experiences, show the pros and cons, and it’s up to society to pick up on these and move at the pace that it is politically capable of moving.” Tabet says that the UNDP is revisiting its democratic governance projects, especially in the areas of human rights, anti-corruption and local governance, to see how they can be adjusted to the “new realities.” The European Union also partners directly with Egyptian government agencies to implement democracy development projects. Since the early 1990s, it has also been a grant agency for civil society organizations through its European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR). The January 25 Revolution has had an immediate impact on how the grants are funded and distributed. “[The] amounts are higher, the implementation is quicker than it was in the past,” explains Ambassador Marc Franco, head of the EU Delegation to Egypt. “In fact, we’re still now signing the projects from the previous call, so we sped it all up a bit. And the focus is perhaps slightly changed, especially for democracy [and] human rights issues.” Franco explains that the local delegation’s latest budget for democracy and human rights projects has doubled to €2 million (LE 17 million), with another €2 million available from another budget line. The turnaround from the call for proposal to awarding the grant is now expected to take about three months. New grants, he adds, will be more tailored to the requirements of civil society.Perhaps the most publicly scrutinized donor is the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Egypt, which partners with the government on projects and offers grants to civil society organizations. In 2009, USAID Egypt dismayed local democracy activists by ending its Civil Society Direct Grants Program, which unilaterally awarded funds without allowing the Egyptian government input on the grant recipients. That same year, the agency’s budget for “democracy and governance” was halved to $25 million (LE 149 million). An October 2009 audit was blunt in its assessment of the direct grants program, finding that “while the grantee programs reviewed achieved more than half of their planned activities, the impact of these activities was limited because of political circumstances, government resistance and the grantees’ lack of experience.” After ending the direct grants programs, USAID worked solely with government-sanctioned NGOs registered with the Ministry of Social Solidarity, a move critics said was tantamount to caving in to the regime’s pressure. With the fall of Mubarak, civil society organizations say that USAID has once again opened its grant applications to non-registered groups. While the USAID audit blamed government resistance for limiting the impact of democracy grants, Franco says that the EU did not experience major problems with the previous regime. “I don’t think that we run into difficulties on this side. We [ran] into difficulties a couple of times because the government refused the registration of the NGOs that we were working with,” he says. “But I have to say it was fairly limited and we didn’t really feel that there was, I would say, systematic sabotage by the government of the actions we were taking.” Franco speculates that one of the reasons the delegation encountered fewer obstacles is because the EU’s grant budget of €1 million ($1.43 million or LE 8.5 million) is substantially smaller than USAID’s democracy project allocation of $25 million (LE 149 million). Dina Shehata, senior researcher at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, sees the international community’s funding of civil society over the years as more symbolic than substantial. “There have definitely been a lot of democracy promotion initiatives over the past 20 years,” Shehata says. “Have they had an important effect on the changes we’ve seen in the past year? It’s hard to assess, but definitely to some extent. They have contributed to the emergence of a civil society in Egypt — [from grants for] human rights and advocacy NGOs to the training of journalists and so forth — but also there were a lot of structural and local dynamics that probably played a bigger part in the changes we’re seeing.” Shehata also thinks the previous regime’s influence in thwarting democracy projects is overstated. “[The international] projects had limited funding, and their scope was not too huge. We’re talking about $20 million, you know. So it’s not like the US was putting in huge resources into this and the government was diverting them away.” Even with the ouster of Mubarak, it is unlikely that international funding for civil society will increase significantly. “They don’t have money to spend, that’s the thing,” Shehata says. “There’s a lot of talk but very little implementation. So again, the dynamic is not necessarily going to be hugely affected by these efforts, because in the final analysis, they tend to be very, very meager. Neither the EU nor the US is committing substantial resources to this project.” Foreign Stigma Compared to international expenditures for government-based projects, democracy-building grants may not seem substantial, but for local civil society organizations, they are often the only resources they have. The Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies (ICDS), a research, training and advocacy organization founded in 1988 by democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, has relied heavily on international funding for its democracy projects. Acting as an umbrella organization for about 50 smaller organizations, the ICDS applies for large international grants for projects to be implemented nationwide via the smaller NGOs. In addition to preparing research and hosting seminars on democracy, the center also conducts civic education, election monitoring, literacy and micro-loan projects. Use of foreign funding to “tarnish the reputation” of Egypt was one of the charges used by the Mubarak government to imprison Ibrahim and his colleagues in 2000 and shut down the center for three years. ICDS reopened in 2003 after appeals courts overturned the activists’ convictions. ICDS Director Ahmed Rizk says that the government’s antagonism toward Ibrahim and the center had kept international donors such as USAID away. “They didn’t [work] with Ibn Khaldoun before, almost never,” Rizk recalls. “After the down[fall] of the government, the donors announced they will increase the grants and they will [work] with all the NGOs and civil society in an equal way, not with the government.” To get around the government pressure on potential donors, Rizk says, “We were working always with the [donor] associations that have offices abroad, not in Egypt.” Among the associations ICDS works with are the Tunisian office of the US State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI); the Jordanian office of Foundation for the Future, a US-based non-profit funded by several international donors; and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private non-profit organization supported largely by US government funding. Not all democracy NGOs working in Egypt are homegrown. The Washington DC-based Freedom House has advocated democracy around the world for 70 years, turning its attention to the Middle East in the early 2000s. After launching a Tunisia-based regional program called New Generation of Advocates in 2006, Freedom House set up the same program in Egypt the following year. The New Generation program sends young activists on study trips or to conferences to learn from the experiences of their counterparts abroad. Freedom House has also been working with a real-time election monitoring project where violations reported via SMS are mapped online. Sherif Mansour, a senior program officer with Freedom House, says Egypt’s New Generation program was funded mainly by USAID Egypt grants. Because it is not a registered NGO with the Ministry of Social Solidarity, Freedom House was hit hard when USAID ended its direct grants program. “So as a consequence of that, we lost 70 percent of our funding working on Egypt,” Mansour explains. “And only because we were able to secure a small funding from NED last year that we were able to sustain our program.” The New Generation program was at the root of a small controversy surrounding the April 6 Youth Group. In 2008, Freedom House sent Egyptians to a summit on using digital media to help organize social movements. After the revolution, on April 15, 2011, The New York Times ran an article titled “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” quoting Egyptian participant Bassem Fathy as saying the training helped during the revolution. Fathy was identified as a “founder of the youth movement that ultimately drove the Egyptian uprisings,” implying he founded the April 6 Youth Movement. The April 6 members immediately and angrily disavowed Fathy’s role in the movement, telling local media in a press conference, “Foreign funding is totally refused and the movement runs on membership fees and donations from its members.” “April 6 is right — they never received money from us. They received training, they participated individually […] in many of the study tours,” Mansour says, stressing that Freedom House is not a donor organization. “How much that impacted them, how much that impacted the process in Egypt, that depends on who you ask.” The specter of ‘foreign influence,’ long used to discredit opponents of the Mubarak regime, continues to be a sensitive issue amid the post-revolution wave of nationalism. Mansour says every civil society organization has to set policies to safeguard their independence. For Freedom House, that means not accepting government money for research and only taking grants, not contracts, for its advocacy work. ICDS’ Rizk explains that in the call for proposals, grant organizations set general objectives — for example, promoting democratic values or combating torture — but do not dictate the details. “We make the plan to implement this activity, not them.” Pushing for Self-Sufficiency Donors and recipients agree that in the short term, at least, foreign funding is a necessary lifeline for civil society organizations. “Now if you represent the civil society, that means that you’re supported by the civil society. That means your first sources of income, your first sources of support should come from civil society.” Franco says. “Now, it is also clear that in a transition period, a launching period, it is normal that these, let’s say, delicate little new flowers […] need a bit of support and that therefore they can get some support from outside. But I repeat, the basic principle is that this is a society, this is an organization supported by the Egyptian society.” Describing the EU’s grant support as a “micro project,” Franco says, “I do not think it is a bad principle that you do not drown [civil society organizations] in money. They should be able to stand on their own feet and then get some support.” Rizk says the new Egyptian government may provide a little funding for democracy building, but insists that “the responsibility [primarily belongs to] the NGOs and civil society, not the government.” He adds that ICDS is not likely to work with the government even if it does start funding projects. Finding local funding is a challenge though, as Rizk notes that up until now, private donors such as businessmen have not typically funded grants or volunteered with democracy building. Mansour, who is Egyptian, agrees. “I know that other political parties [and] worker unions […] can work within the system to establish some sort of self-reliance, but NGOs do not have that right now. We do not have that culture of fundraising for civil society, not yet.” He hopes that this will change as civil society organizations develop, but “until they are able to fundraise internally, [until] they are able to build the capacity and technical skills, [foreign funding is] necessary. “With regards to civil society organizations and political parties, they could use some support from the outside,” ACPSS’ Shehata acknowledges, “but ultimately this will have to be built on solid domestic foundations.” Skipping the parties What international donors are not planning to do is fund individual political parties, existing or new. “This is not our business because that would be kind of interfering in internal matters, because that becomes very political,” says the EU’s Franco. “We cannot grant money to political parties. We can grant money to civil society organizations that are involved in these processes [of strengthening parties]. At the same time, we can facilitate contacts between the existing and emerging political parties here in Egypt and counterparts in Europe.” The UNDP has helped political parties in other countries, specifically in teaching them how to apply the principles of democratic governance within the party. Tabet says, however, that UNDP Egypt has no immediate plans to offer these programs. “The political party scene is still evolving, and to be very frank with you, it’s much easier to work with one entity than with multiple,” he says. “Now post-elections, […] we would be very keen on working with an elected Parliament on its role in terms of holding government accountable, in terms of representation, in terms of legislation. And there clearly you work with members of political parties, but in their capacity as parliamentarians rather than members of political parties.” The UNDP has already started facilitating contacts between local players and their international counterparts. In early June, the UNDP hosted the International Forum on Pathways of Democratic Transitions, connecting Arab delegations from Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan with officials from South Africa, Indonesia, Chile and other countries that have managed to install democracy. Among the topics addressed were moving from a social movement to a political party, forming coalitions, and writing constitutions, as well as economic and justice issues. Freedom House has also opted to stay out of politics. “I know that […] a lot of the new parties, a lot of the youth groups, need a lot of help and need people like us, but I know that Freedom House consciously decided not to work with political parties,” Mansour says. “That in a way preserves the organization’s interest, that they are not affiliated with the particular agenda, but also we do not have the [expertise] on working on these issues.” ACPSS’ Shehata says that it would be counterproductive for political parties to seek financial assistance from international agencies. “Ultimately parties cannot depend on foreign funding,” she notes. “If they are to be viable, they have to be able to fundraise domestically, otherwise they’re not really viable.” No matter what type of democracy emerges and what role civil society plays in it, Tabet notes that Egypt will always be interacting with the international community, which will continue to provide support and expertise in helping the country develop. “I personally believe that Egyptians are both confident enough and knowledgeable enough to know and distinguish when something is an interference and when something is genuine support,” says Tabet. “And they are able to make that distinction and would be happy to receive the genuine support and most likely to be ready not to deal with that which is seen as foreign interference.” |
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