International institutions are
non-governmental institutions created in developed countries to provide various kinds of aid and
development assistance to developing countries. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are funded
by their country of origin's government, but are not overseen or regulated by those governments.
Clear examples of these international institutions are the International Monetary Fund, the
International Red Cross, and the World
Health Organization.
Some of the roles played by NGOs (or
international institutions) and some of the challenges faced by developing countries that NGOs
address are described in the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include
"combating HIV/AIDS," eliminating "extreme poverty and hunger," empowering
women and promoting gender equality, and achieving "universal primary education" (UN
Millennium Project). href="http://www.gdrc.org/ngo/state-ngo.html">NGOs work in developing
countries on challenges such as poverty, economic inequality, trade barriers, sustainable
industry, education, human rights, health and disease, child mortality, agriculture, and
economic growth.
The history of NGOs, such as the IMF and World Bank, shows
NGOs, while interested in improving challenges in developing countries, are also interested in
profits. Many NGOs have received a lot of href="http://www.globalissues.org/article/25/non-governmental-organizations-on-development-issues">criticism
on their philosophies, plans, and actions, and this criticism has led to attempts to improve the
href="http://www.globalissues.org/article/25/non-governmental-organizations-on-development-issues">focus
and methods of NGOs. A significant point of criticism has been that NGO development
projects give rise to new challenges that are detrimental to the growth of health, economies,
human rights, and sustainable ecological development. href="http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-03.htm">Ecological degradation is
one of the newly arising challenges caused by NGOs. The history of the Mobil oil pipeline (now
Exxon Mobil) in Nigeria is a good illustration of how development projects funded by NGOsin this
case the World
Bankcan result in serious new challenges.
NGO-funded development of
cash crops, such as
cotton, which are intended to increase a developing country's national income by exporting the
crop to developed nations, illustrates how some challenges addressed by NGOs have not been
resolved, while simultaneously giving rise to new challenges. Cash crop emphasis was a strategy
to address the hunger associated with extreme poverty. Planting cash crops did increase national
income and reduce poverty, but emphasizing cash crops monopolized limited agricultural lands.
The cumulative result of the cash crop strategy is to trap the poorest people in continued
hunger because the cash crop of the small, poor farmer displaces the sustenance food crops that
would otherwise feed the farmers, their families, and their neighbors. In this way, the
challenge of hunger was left unresolved while raising the new challenge of land
degradation.
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