Shams Alibhai, Executive Director for BCCIC
Kristin Unger: Could you provide me with a brief synopsis of the British Columbia Council for International Cooperation and your role in it?
Shams Alibhai: We are a membership-based organization and a coalition of currently about 35 organizational members and about 30 individual members. Our mission is to engage our members and others, non-profit organizations that don’t work in international development but could include organizations that work on issues of the environment, issues of sustainability, private sector organizations, and the provincial government, to share knowledge, build relationships, and develop their capacity towards achieving sustainable global development. Our vision is that British Columbians are engaged in global cooperation for a just, equitable, and sustainable world.
KU: What are your current projects?
SA: We’re part of a coalition, so there’s a council like ours in seven other regions. We’ve worked on a variety of different things. We just launched a public engagement hub, which is a hub that shares best practices in public engagement. Together, we’re referred to as the Inter-Council Network. [The hub is] called GlobalHive.ca. This was the result of several years of work, where each one of the councils across the country selected a particular topic to work on. In B.C., we looked at how organizations that work in public engagement do monitoring and evaluation. The Manitoba council looked at how you integrate gender into public engagement. It’s really looking at best practices from a variety of different organizations across the country.
KU: Have you noticed any changes in those projects with the merger of CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) into DFAIT (Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development)?
SA: Both we and our members will be affected. How we’ll be affected, I think it’s just too early at this stage to be able to say that. There are positive things, and there may be challenges ahead. I think the overall vision in terms of having the political arm, the diplomatic arm, the trade arm and the NGOs collaborating together in these different regions, in the long term could be very positive, but how that will actually be accomplished is going to be the big challenge.
Interview with the BCCIC
KU: How difficult is it, functioning as a liaison between the provincial and international levels?
SA: We don’t ourselves liaise internationally. We’re part of another council called the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC) and they are also a membership-based organization. Most of our members are small and mid-sized NGOs. Their members tends to be the mid-size and the larger NGOS, like PLAN, World Vision and OXFAM. It is CCIC that actually has people that work in the area of policy development. For example, there’s been a forum around development effectiveness, something called the Istanbul Principles. It was staff from CCIC that attended these meetings internationally and represented the Canadian NGO community. We liaise with CCIC, and they share their learning from that international participation with us, and then we in turn share that with our members.
KU: Do you see any of the difficulties they encounter internationally?
SA: I think globally there are just many, many changes happening. With the investment by China and India, particularly on the African continent, it’s change in which international development actually happens now with our partners and our members in those countries. Also, there is a lot of investment in the mining communities in these countries as well, and that’s something that is being questioned and lots of issues are being raised around how the Canadian government is funding organizations that do have some involvement in the mining sector.
KU: What is your most memorable experience, working for BCCIC?
SA: We actually work with four different communities in British Columbia. We have organizations and individuals that collaborate with us in Prince George, the Comox Valley, Kamloops, Victoria and in Nelson, and really I think the thing that I find most enjoyable is going to these communities and looking at how, even in these smaller remote communities, there’s actually a thriving number of organizations and individuals that are involved in issues of international development. There’s a film festival that takes place in the Comox Valley. It’s been taking place for almost 25 years, and they bring together 1,500 people over a weekend, once a year in the beginning of February. These are documentary films around issues of the environment, poverty issues, issues of the ocean and sustainability, and we support them in their work. They don’t receive any government funding. They’re a small NGO based in that community, but they’re doing remarkable work.
KU: NGOs: how effective are they really?
SA: I think that the NGOs are very effective in the work that they do, and there’s such a variety of NGOs. They work in different ways, and you actually need a combination of this diversity to bring about good development. I think many of these NGOs should continue to receive funding, and should in fact be receiving more government funding for the work that they do.
KU: What question should I be asking you that I haven’t?
SA: The issue is how do we work with Canadians to bring the awareness about global poverty in a better way to the everyday person. There’s no one magic bullet, there’s a diversity of ways, but I think part of it is that how do we bring media attention to these issues so that it doesn’t seem like these are issues that are very far away. It’s the local and the global connection. These are issues that affect Canadians. What happens in Nicaragua, what happens in Kenya, what happens in all these communities around the world does affect us in our daily lives here. How can we get the media to bring attention to a lot of the positive things that are happening, and not only the negative things.
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The final instalment of this series will be the author’s opinion on NGOs and their work in the international community.
Aasim Raza
Poverty can not be eradicated merely with the help of NGOs. If this was the case then the countries in the Indian Sub-continent and South East Asia would have been the one of the most developed countries in the world and this clearly is not the case. Unfortunately, what really happens is that the money flushed into these NGOs is spent heavily on exuberant payouts and dining and meetings in 5 star hotels, rather than helping out the needy. Only if the NGOs can cut back on their expenses and heavy salaries that they pay to their executives, only then more positive results can be seen on this front.