What role do NGOs play in the grassroots women's movement? An interview with Srilatha Batliwala from the Hauser Centre for Non-Profit Organisations, Harvard University.

• Author: Duddy, Janice
• Position: Interview - Interview

What do you feel is the current role of NGOs in the grassroots women's movements?

I don't think that the role of NGOs is different today from what I thought it should have been 10 years ago. The first role that NGOs have is to help build grassroots women's movements where they don't exist. They have to be catalysts in creating spaces for poor women to gather, mobilise, and organise. Their first priority of NGOs should be to catalyse and enable the formation of grassroots women's organisations, We cannot speak of a "women's movement" without this kind of grassroots base.

The second critical role NGOs have to play is supporting grassroots organisations, linking them together and helping transform them into a movement. They must also support women's groups to develop critical social change and action agendas.

The third role is to step bock and support the movement and its leadership in multiple ways. One such way is by opening up advocacy spaces--instead of occupying the advocacy spaces themselves, which is what they tend to do now. They should encourage movements to use things like research, data collection, and the creation of alternative analyses, as well as to promote changes in the patterns of engagement and negotiation with state authorities so that this relationship is not always one of confrontation or supplication, but it can move towards partnership and negotiation.

The fourth important role that NGOs can play is to enable grassroots women's movements to form alliances and partnerships with a range of other movements and other civil society actors, in order to change the agendas and perspectives of these other movements. If women have a formidable mass base, they can't be ignored. But today women are not seen, in many parts of the world, as any kind of political force or as a mass base. This is partly because NGOs have been content to treat them as beneficiaries of various kinds of economic development programs. They are content to organise them into extremely successful savings and credit groups, for example, or into extremely successful micro enterprise programs. Now imagine if the participants in these programs saw themselves and played the role of being a movement for social, economic, and political change--it is a formidable force. But the NGOs need to have the vision to build that.

I want to underscore a fifth role--NGOs have to constantly re-examine their role and relationship vis-a-vis grassroots women's organisations and later when they become movements. I don't like the synonymous use of movement and organisation. This is completely confused in my opinion. You can have millions of organisations, as we indeed we do have in South Asia, without them constituting a movement. I want to underscore that distinction. This fifth role is to be critical in examining how their role and relationship vis-a-vis organisation and movement building is changing. The challenge I gave myself when I was part of a NGO relating to grassroots women and the challenge that I would therefore give to any NGO working with women is to look at your relationship and your role in their process 10 years ago and today, and ask how has it changed? If I don't see a very fundamental shift then I know that organisation is not facilitating the emergence of a movement. NGOs have their own institutional stakes in continuing to play a certain kind of role. I am hot saying this in a harshly judgemental way. I am saying it in the context of the question you are asking. If an NGO decides it is not into movement building but wants to help poor women to better their lives in some way, saying 'we will run savings and credit groups for 35 years' and 'we will help women market their produce for 47 years', and 'we will run childcare centres and health services and literacy classes for the foreseeable future', that is perfectly fine. I can challenge that in some other framework. If that is the role that you have chosen, to be a service provider, someone that addresses the daily conditions and needs of women, and you are satisfied to play that role that is fine. But then I don't think that you can pretend to be movement building, or be an actor in a movement building debate, I don't think that you should have a voice in that debate because you are hot from a movement-building perspective.

How would you define a movement or a movement--building perspective?

First of all a movement is a political process. A...