Problem Maintenance Vs Problem Solving; Why Most NGOs Fail

I have a problem with NGOs.

It's nothing personal, I promise. I started one myself.

Here's the truth: conventional NGOs cannot solve the major problems we have in the world today. They can't solve poverty; they can't solve climate crisis; and neither can they solve the problem of education.

The reason is simple: conventional NGOs do not solve problems, they maintain them.

To illustrate, most NGOs that try to solve the problem of education provide stationery to learners, sponsor learners to school, replace school furniture, talk to students, etc. While this is laudable, it does very little to solve the actual problem of education—it only maintains it.

It's like a farmer whose farmland is just a small rocky area. Giving him a sharper cutlass and teaching him about farm optimization may increase his yield by a few units, but it still doesn't solve the problem—he has a farmland that just can't work.

In the same vane, giving kids new stationery may help in the short term but they are still learning from an unmotivated teacher who is teaching them an outdated curriculum, which makes them more likely to end up unemployed in today's world and have children who will not be able to purchase stationery and...the cycle continues.

The problem of education, just like poverty and climate crisis, is a wicked problem - it needs a complete upturn of radical changes.

What we currently have is a group of individuals working tirelessly to maintain a broken system by providing materials or awareness to learners.

It's just like trying to solve the climate crisis by convincing drivers to use their cars less, asking car manufacturers to reduce production, and holding placards in front of government houses (hello, Greta :)). This will do a great job of maintaining the problem, but it will never solve it.

Contrast that with the radical solution of electric cars. Although it's still not enough, Tesla is solving the climate crisis more than all activists combined (yup, I just said that). By the way, they are making a hell lotta money, too.

This is not a call to ban all NGOs. Rather, it's a call for us to collectively find solutions that will eradicate or drastically reduce the problems that are posing to wipe humanity out. At the moment, NGOs do not fit that description. We need startups with radical solutions.

But here's the catch: building a company is like a suicide mission. You are more likely to fail than to succeed and the odds are stacked against you.

It sounds sweet to talk about creating companies, but we forget that Elon Musk almost went bankrupt on his path to building Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City.

But you also don't have to build a company yourself. Find someone doing something great with their business and join the club.

So we have a choice...

We can keep taking the easy path by maintaining problems and transferring them to later generations. Or we can take the difficult path of proactively creating/being part of actual solutions to these problems.

One path is problem maintenance, the other is problem-solving. What path do you choose?