Aftershock : aid, Ebola, and civil society in West Africa
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Despite significant international aid to local and national organizations and their role in community education and mobilization, they are often marginalized during crisis. International humanitarian organizations cite the lack of technical capacity and the political nature of local organizations, as reasons to not work with them. Concurrently, the nonprofit sector experiences increased demands for metrics and specialization, assumed to reflect organizational capacity. As a result, nonprofit organizations dependent on foreign aid slowly move away from the grassroots, and towards professionalization and specialization. However, does the professionalization of civil society organizations, through an over-reliance on metrics, blueprints, and specialization, restrict organizational capacity to generate civic engagement? In this study, I explore a major paradox in terms of how international NGOs work with local organizations in developing countries by examining the 2013-2016 West Africa Ebola response. I address the lack of data on domestic organizations in Sierra Leone and Guinea by collecting my own unique data through extensive fieldwork. As a consequence of the expansion of bureaucracy by international organizations, I find that organizational professionalism potentially restricts broader civic engagement in two aid-dependent countries with different levels of foreign funding, Guinea and Sierra Leone. The evidence for these conclusions comes from a combination of interviews with domestic organizations in Sierra Leone and Guinea, automated text analysis of international humanitarian organization strategy reports, and a dataset merging cross-national survey data on social capital and WHO Ebola mortality data.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Reddy, Michelle Mary |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Ramirez, Francisco O |
| Thesis advisor | Ramirez, Francisco O |
| Thesis advisor | Carnoy, Martin |
| Thesis advisor | Wotipka, Christine |
| Degree committee member | Carnoy, Martin |
| Degree committee member | Wotipka, Christine |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Michelle Mary Reddy. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Michelle Mary Reddy
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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