The personal and professional problems of field workers of NGOs in Bangladesh

摘要

Field workers should be the movers and shakers of their NGOs and it is they who implement the policies of their NGOs. Yet it seems that nobody (neither the policy makers of NGOs, nor donors, nor academics) is concerned to improve their performance by better management. There has been very limited research on NGO field workers outside the North. This article makes an effort to highlight the personal and professional problems of the field workers of NGOs in Bangladesh, where there may be more and bigger NGOs than in any other country of comparable population. The paper draws on a field research with the front-line workers of four NGOs, their clients, immediate superiors and senior management. Field workers face personal problems such as job insecurity, financial difficulties, problems with accommodation, and family dislocation. These personal problems differ according to gender, marital status and age. Their professional problems include training, workload, promotion, transfer, treatment by superiors and status at work. Apart from these job issues, field workers face problems in their external relationships such as suspicion, resistance or lack of co-operation from religious leaders and local bosses, time and resource constraints, lack of availability of suitable clients and eagerness of the clients to get financial or material benefits. It is argued that the strengths of the field workers of Southern NGOs have been largely unexplored and undervalued. This paper seeks to make recommendations forNGOs in solving these problems to make their work more effective.