ABSTRACT
The Central African Republic (CAR) is an extremely poor, landlocked country, where 75 per cent of the population of 4 million live below the poverty line. Tanzania, meanwhile, is a coastal country with a population of about 38 million, of whom 11 million live below the poverty line. Accordingly, one would expect Tanzania to receive greater support from international development NGOs – in equivalent terms, about three times as much. The real difference, however, is much greater. 61 Of the world’s largest non-governmental development organizations spend only around €1 million a year in the Central African Republic, compared with around €70 million a year in Tanzania. The Central African Republic is an example of a ‘donor orphan’, and this is all the more striking when one considers that the CAR ranked 172nd out of 177 countries on the Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP 2006a). More alarming still is the drop in social indicators during the last ten years. Life expectancy has fallen dramatically from 49 years in 1988 to 42.7 in 2003 (UNDP 2006a), and the situation in the education and health-care sector is bleak (World Bank 2007) (UNDP 2006b). For Tanzania, meanwhile, the figures tell a different story: the Human Development Index rose from 0.45 in 1985 to 0.52 in 2005. Tanzania is now 159th on the list. Current non-profit location theories cannot provide an adequate explana-
tion for this seemingly disproportionate distribution of aid. These theories either consider non-profit organizations as altruistic organizations that address the needs of the population, or as entities that make geographic choices based on budget-maximization, or as a combination of both. These theories virtually all rely on a neo-classical supply (funding) and demand (need) framework (Zeller et al. 2001; Smith and Wiest 2005; Fruttero and Gauri 2005; Nancy and Yontcheva 2006), and fail to provide an adequate explanation of the real levels of aid concentration observed. They do not take the insights from evolutionary economic geography into consideration. This chapter proposes a non-profit agency location theory: an evolutionary
economic geography approach to non-profit organizations. The approach is better able to clarify the existing patterns of geographic concentration among
The research focuses on ing returns, labour mobility and path dependence, while paying due attention to contextual factors (Boschma and Frenken 2003; Arthur 1994). This chapter suggests that many of these economic geography elements, which are normally used to explain concentration of for-profit companies, can also be set to work to understand concentration among non-profit organizations. Please note that this chapter focuses on the factors at the recipient country level that can contribute to the clustering of NGOs, while the following chapters (5 and 6) focus on factors within international NGOs and at the back-donor level respectively. The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. First, the chapter
commences by outlining the contours of the proposed evolutionary economic geography approach to non-profit organizations, drawing extensively on the evolutionary economic geography approach. This approach is then applied to two case studies that represent two contrasting outcomes in terms of NGO concentration: Tanzania and the CAR. Tanzania, and in particular the Arusha region – which is the focus of this research – is characterized by a large-scale expansion in the foreign-funded NGO sector. No such expansion has been observed in the CAR. These two contrasting cases will enable the research to analyse the determinants of clustering among NGOs in depth. Finally, the chapter discusses how the approach can be refined in light of the findings of the case studies.
