Dangerous liaisons

Yesterday’s editorial argued that the rapid expansion of DukeEngage could undermine the program’s ability to best realize its mission—to transform students and work with communities. Today, we argue that one crucial constraint on DukeEngage’s size should be its ability to audit partner nongovernmental organizations.

DukeEngage is not by itself imperialistic. Duke has nothing to gain by creating spheres of influence in the communities that DukeEngage works with. DukeEngage aims to avoid fostering dependence and to promote community self-sufficiency, and we think the program is true to its word.

But the NGOs that DukeEngage partners with can and do have interests separate from the communities that they operate within. NGO employees are just people­—people who need to win grants to pay their salaries and who may have personal histories­—angry ones—with members of their communities. This can effect Duke students. In one now infamous DukeEngage horror story, Lisa Ma, Trinity ’10, describes a Trinidad and Tobago NGO more concerned with feather-flashing than working with the surrounding community. DukeEngage can only ensure that student energy is not co-opted by misguided partner organizations by rigorously vetting these organizations.

This is no small beer. Community elites—which frequently include NGO brass—are often the easiest to talk to. It is much easier for a DukeEngage staffer to audit a site by talking to the English speakers in a community, those familiar with western cultural practice and who know how to hob-knob with westerners. But talking to community elites—the low hanging fruit—misses the point of an audit: to figure out how an NGO impacts the people it aims to help.

The best way to audit an NGO is to visit it. Last year, the DukeEngage staff visited 14 of the 30 group project sites. Visiting less than half of the sites is not enough. If limited resources prevent a visit to every site, then DukeEngage should downsize.

But even visiting every NGO isn’t enough—they must be evaluated effectively, and to do this, the program needs objective evaluative criteria and experts to conduct the evaluations. DukeEngage staff can only conduct limited evaluations if they don’t know the language and culture of the areas they visit. Meanwhile, Duke has a hidden cache of experts on language and culture: its faculty. Why not have relevant faculty travel with auditing teams to evaluate partner NGOs? Faculty speak the language and know the historical and cultural trends in an area. Who better to evaluate an NGO’s impact on a community and to tease out the selfish interests of partner NGOs?

Evaluation cannot stop at community impact. DukeEngage’s first constituency, by its own admission, is student participants. If an NGO cannot provide the sort of experience that transforms a student—and that DukeEngage considers integral to its impact on individual students and the Duke campus—then DukeEngage should not partner with it. Because students can self-report their own experiences, we are not too worried about evaluating this factor. But it, too, should figure into evaluation.

Bigger is not better, especially when we risk helping the wrong people by expanding unnecessarily. DukeEngage should curb its growth until it can properly audit partner NGOs.