This is an important subject, thanks for writing about it. I want to share a couple of points, I don’t usually write long posts or comments, so please excuse any misplaced brevity.
NGO jobs are not all targeting grant writing and networking with other NGOs. The paper you cite—Desarrano et al is discussing a case where community health workers move from govt to NGO. It is not that the skills they learn aren’t valuable. The findings of the paper are far more nuanced about what is causing negative impact on health outcomes. In this specific case, the NGO actually doesn’t pay the community workers with aid money, they pay them a commission on sales of products. This raises an important question too: are NGOs being forced to rely on sales to pay their staff.
There are so many private organizations where staff are not employed in a manner that is productive for the society—including increasing profit margins despite negative externalities and networking, so the counterfactual is not automatically “more productive” for the economy. But you make an important point about needing to think about local impact beyond the health outcomes. That is a difficult and expensive enterprise but some researchers are doing that e.g., long term followup studies on deworming and cash.
These salaries are high partly because of lack of skilled workforce, so programs focused on capacity building could alleviate some of those concerns.
This is an important subject, thanks for writing about it. I want to share a couple of points, I don’t usually write long posts or comments, so please excuse any misplaced brevity.
NGO jobs are not all targeting grant writing and networking with other NGOs. The paper you cite—Desarrano et al is discussing a case where community health workers move from govt to NGO. It is not that the skills they learn aren’t valuable. The findings of the paper are far more nuanced about what is causing negative impact on health outcomes. In this specific case, the NGO actually doesn’t pay the community workers with aid money, they pay them a commission on sales of products. This raises an important question too: are NGOs being forced to rely on sales to pay their staff.
There are so many private organizations where staff are not employed in a manner that is productive for the society—including increasing profit margins despite negative externalities and networking, so the counterfactual is not automatically “more productive” for the economy. But you make an important point about needing to think about local impact beyond the health outcomes. That is a difficult and expensive enterprise but some researchers are doing that e.g., long term followup studies on deworming and cash.
These salaries are high partly because of lack of skilled workforce, so programs focused on capacity building could alleviate some of those concerns.