What Challenges Facing NGOs

Driven by the will to serve, many people around the world take a brave step forward and establish an NGO. In many countries, the process of registration is not very complicated or expensive and that encourages more people to establish more NGOs.

After a time, they will find that establishing and registering the NGO was the easiest challenge in the process and will shortly recognize that a lot of serious challenges are still ahead. Some of these challenges will with time cause the closure of the NGO and the community will lose a loyal actor who helped many of the vulnerable people in that community.

What are these challenges? Below is a list of the most common challenges faced by NGOs around the world. It is not including all of these challenges yet it contains the most difficult and common ones:

1.??????Lack of Funds: NGOs are facing huge difficulty in finding sufficient and continuous funding for their work. They have limited resource mobilization skills and are often not looking for funds available locally, preferring to wait for international donors to approach them.

2.??????Poor Governance: there is little understanding of why NGOs are required to have Boards or what their roles and functions should be. While good governance is very important for NGO accountability and transparency, many founders are not willing to lose their power to a board and keep directing their NGOs in the direction that serves their interests.

3.??????Absence of Strategic Planning: for many NGOs, it will be hard to develop a strategy due to the instability of the situation they are living in but that will put them in a challenge of poor planning and difficulty measuring their impact over time.

4.??????Limited Capacity: many NGOs recognize that they have limited technical and organizational capacity but only a few NGOs are able or willing to pay for such capacity building. The speed of technology changes is also a challenge, particularly in areas of IT capacity.

5.??????Poor Networking and lack of coordination were identified as major challenges. It is the cause of duplication of efforts, conflicting strategies at the community level, a lack of learning from experience, and an inability of NGOs to address local structural causes of poverty, deprivation, and under-development. Many NGOs, large and small, intervene at the community level without any community mapping and implement projects without due regard to ongoing community initiatives.

6.??????Government procedures: in many countries the governments put some difficult procedures and requirements on the NGOs associated with a hard penalty system which might cause the NGO to be suspended or closed. In other countries, the government doesn’t understand the NGOs' role correctly and treats them similar to companies and which will limit their ability to serve.

It is worth mentioning that my choice for these challenges came from personal experience of at least a decade of working in the NGOs sector. Still, I would appreciate sharing your experience on this issue.

The best of luck to all NGOs around the world.

CEO