With US President Donald Trump’s executive order pausing all US foreign assistance funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a spotlight was shone on Sri Lanka’s Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) sector as well.
Civil society groups islandwide reported being affected as the overnight stoppage of funds impacted their work. In this backdrop, women’s rights activists and grassroots political/labour organisers are reflecting on and encouraging a change in approach to funding movements.
Speaking to The Sunday Morning, feminist activist and researcher Sarala Emmanuel raised two schools of thought with regard to foreign funding – funding can support spaces which enable movements, but can be counterproductive to thinking creatively and responding to ground realities.
Citing Dr. Malathi de Alwis, Emmanuel said that funding for NGOs in the 1980s “took away” the politics and autonomy of feminist movements to make them similar to projects. However, she also cited Dr. Selvy Thiruchandran to highlight that in the context of authoritative power – as was the case in Sri Lanka during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s – autonomous spaces enabled by independent funding became safe spaces where people could meet, support each other, and document violations.
“Funding is to support the space and the people who maintain and nourish that space, which then enables movements. Funding is not for the movements. We may have small reprieves, but when we go back to the status quo of extremely repressive governments, physically having these community-based spaces is really important,” said Emmanuel.
She drew an example from the early 2000s when foreign funding flowed into women’s rights spaces in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami and the destruction nature left in its wake.
“It was called the second tsunami. It created a whole new sector of employment opportunities for women and it was huge, especially in rural economies like Batticaloa where there aren’t many options for women to find employment,” she said, reflecting on how this led to recruitment predominantly of women, from preschool teachers to community mobilisers to health workers and activists.
This wave shook patriarchal structures to the point where there was a backlash against women working in the humanitarian sector and in NGOs. Petitions were signed demanding that women stop work, not travel at night, and not travel with men.
It was a vibrant economy that made society “uncomfortable” with the mobility and employment of women. At the same time, it was an economy which invested in human resources and created a “different kind of labour force” conscious of rights, democracy, and social change.
As a women’s rights activist of nearly 15 years, Emmanuel sees two sides to donor funding. On one hand, it provides security and helps create an enabling environment for movements. Independent funding can help create “life or death spaces” such as for the LGBTQIA+ community, in instances where states do not provide that support.
However, donor-funded projects often function “like a garment factory,” according to Emmanuel, where labour is outsourced and risk is transferred down.
“Such a model can kill any space for imagining bigger social change. That model keeps you on your toes, which, as I have found in my experience heading an organisation and writing a million proposals, is extremely counterproductive to any kind of flexible thinking and being responsive to the ground realities. You forget the people and you are just implementing activities which are, in a way, damaging to movements.”
Cause-driven work
Mannar Women’s Development Federation (MWDF) Co-Founder and Women’s Action Network Founder/Co-Convenor Shreen Abdul Saroor noted how donors “come in with their own agendas,” affecting the “cause-driven” work of activists. Causes change with time as ground realities change, so their work in the north has been about responding to the needs of the people, including displacement, war-related atrocities, and domestic violence.
However, donor funding could compel them to make only “measurable changes” which align with the donor’s project. This can mean that they are unable to respond effectively to the needs of the people, especially as theirs was a post-war movement working on complicated, protection-related issues.
“For example, a particular donor might give funds to an organisation for a project which requires an employee to be 100% allocated to that project. That’s impossible when we are putting out various fires. We can’t prioritise one fire and say that we will put out only that fire,” said Saroor.
Furthermore, Saroor highlighted the ethics of receiving foreign funds for their work. When MWDF was registered in 2001, it made a decision to not accept funds from the US Government as the latter was involved in a war in Afghanistan, affecting women and children there. Thus, MWDF is “selective” in who it chooses to work with.
She also criticised how large donors could negatively affect the solidarity within movements by causing people to break away.
“Solidarity is not built on money. Solidarity is not built on resources. Solidarity should be built on cause. That’s something we have been holding on to as a women’s movement, particularly with regard to the minority community – we really don’t want to lose sight of the cause.”
‘More harm than good’
United Federation of Labour President Swasthika Arulingam said foreign funds to labour movements had caused “more harm than good” as they merely intended to “contain” politics and movements in the Global South.
“When any movement which seriously thinks about resisting status quo politics begins to depend on donors who are promoting the status quo, they can’t actually resist. We saw that in the labour movements, peasants’ movements, and more recently in the fisheries movements as well.
“They are reliant on large donor funding, so budgets, maintenance, and salaries are huge, and it becomes about maintaining the organisation instead of the politics of the movement,” said Arulingam.
She criticised how large foreign donors such as USAID had “broken” the traditional culture of funding labour movements, where each worker contributed financially to it in the manner they could, increasing accountability and participation within the movement itself.
“When NGOs received large amounts of funding, they became too lazy to do politics and gathered workers into halls by paying them stipends. Workers came for the stipend and not because they were interested in participating in politics. After 10-15 years of this, if you approach a worker about collective action for an issue, they would ask us how much money we can give them,” she added.
Therefore, Arulingam encouraged returning to traditional methods of funding: fund collection, reaching out to supporters, reaching out to solidarity and support groups outside the country, and membership contribution.