What about the IPSIs?

By this term and its acronym, the authors describe activites of international solidarity organized and initiated by men and women without any political or mercenary intention within groups that are more or less formalized and which do not benefit from any agreement of co-financing from public powers to successfully complete their projects. These men and women present diverse Socio-professional profiles but share an equal interest in cooperation activity conducted in our country (raising funds, awareness, etc.) and abroad, “in partnership” with beneficiaries that live outside our borders. These are the initiatives of “ordinary citizens”, which exclude cooperation practices carried out by institutions or organizations (schools, universities, trade-unions, insurance companies etc.).

The figure suggested by the researchers is that there are 620 active IPSIs in the Wallonia and Brussels region and this seems to be a reliable estimate.  Based on this estimate, the researchers conducted their survey and they sent a questionnaire to these 620 organizations. The managers of 171 IPSIs (equally spread over the five provinces of Wallonia and Brussels-Capital) participated in the survey with a satisfactory response rate of 28%.

It is important to note that 67% of the respondents were presidents of the association; the others occupied the role of secretary, treasurer or vice-president. Also, in the context of the survey, 74% of the respondents were the creator of the IPSIs they represent which does not rule out the idea that the image of the associations in question reflects the personalities of their creators.

A call for professionalism weighed against human commitment

In an international context, as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) approaches, the call for more efficiency and professionalism on the part of aid operators has never been greater. This fact also applies to Belgium and the country has undergone some of its own transformations: there has been an updating of law with regard to Belgian International cooperation, reform of the financing of non-governmental actors, or debates about diminished competence calling into question the very existence of some aid activists. Regular insistence on the importance of defining the legitimacy of cooperation activists from a “quality” viewpoint is understandable based on current thinking about aid which is obscured by a management policy that is based on results and its indicators-often quantitative in nature-are “objectively verifiable” by an obsession with verification, control and transparency leading to an accumulation of paperwork and aid relations that are dehumanized by standardized projects. The IPSIs have often underlined the fact: cooperation is above all a human affair, conducted on a small scale, actions which are not made up of “results” but “successes”, and “disappointments” which are alleviated by the principle of friendly relations.

The rights of the citizen to international cooperation

“What we are concerned with here”, affirm the researchers, “is this permanent insistence on the efficacy of this aid and the requirement for more professionalism (of operators, their methods and their tools etc.)”. In this context a debate seems to be emerging as to the way of expressing this right to international cooperation. Should this “ordinary” citizen, in the name of the quest for efficiency, delegate the working of this right to a street-wise organization that is recognized by the authorities as reliable and serious? Or should this citizen himself exercise this right to cooperation in favor of projects whose definition and execution he has direct control over, in partnership with local populations? To be clear, should the implementation of this international solidarity be restricted to a group with fewer and fewer operators? From our point of view, the limitation of the concrete expression of the right to international cooperation to just a few actors that have been granted legitimacy by public powers would be a lost cause from the start despite the strongly-held belief that aid can be improved by promoting action by a few hyper-qualified actors in the field of cooperation.