Do Foreign Funds Really Come with their own Political Agendas and Discourse? An Investigation of Women’s Rights Organizations in Egypt

Abstract

As part of a crackdown on NGOs that receive foreign funds in Egypt, the Egyptian authorities accused 43 Egyptian and American NGO employees in Egypt of being foreign agents, and thereby advancing the political agenda of the US, by virtue of their employing NGOs’ receiving funds from the Obama administration (Al-desoukie & Allam, 2012). The authorities’ association of foreign funds with political agendas was what spurred the present study which set out to investigate women’s rights organizations in Egypt and whether the foreign funds they receive necessarily come with their own imposed (political or social) agendas and feminist discourse, and if so, how such agendas are imposed, and how they influence women’s rights organizations that receive such funds in terms of the decisions they make, their agenda and discourse, their mission, and the kinds of projects they oversee, by answering the following questions: 1) Do some women’s rights organizations in Egypt receive foreign funds? 2) What foreign entities fund such organizations and in what capacity do they do so: Are they governmental or nongovernmental? 3) Do such entities impose their own (political or social) agenda and feminist discourse on the organizations they choose to fund? How so, and how do such agendas and discourse manifest themselves; do they ask them to start particular projects, for example, or do they enforce or dictate ideologies and rules they ask the funded organizations to stick to? 4) Where are the women’s rights organizations that are funded by foreign entities mostly located: in the Delta, Upper Egypt, or Cairo; in the urban or rural communities? 5) What are the types of projects and feminist issues and discourse, if any, that such funding entities are interested in and start? 6) How involved are the fund givers in the decision-making process of women’s rights organizations in Egypt? That is, are they involved in daily decisions or do they simply lay ground rules that have to be followed or do they simply supply them with the cash and leave the decisions and project assignments to the discretion of the managers to spend the money on what they deem more relevant or pressing? Is there anything off-limits to them? Do women’s organizations, for example, not allow them to intervene in certain decisions or projects? If so, what are they? 7) How and why do they target such organizations to begin with? What kinds of questions do they ask such organizations in order to decide whether or not to fund them?

To answer the research questions, a desk research was conducted and the literature written on the subject of foreign-funded women’s organizations in Egypt was reviewed; whether some NGOs in Egypt receive foreign funds, and if so, what kind of organizations they are. Explored also was where such organizations are located in Egypt, how such organizations are chosen to be funded, how involved the funding entities are at the decision-making levels, and whether or not they impose their own agendas and discourse on the organizations they fund, and, if so, how. A qualitative analysis of the literature was conducted to answer the research questions, and the following was revealed: the US and the EU fund certain women’s organizations in Egypt in an attempt to promote democracy, economic reform, and women and human rights in the Middle East (Durac, 2009). Foreign agencies choose to fund the organizations that represent their own ideologies to begin with; they do not necessarily impose their own agendas on the grantees (Badawi, 2007). If anything, it is the Egyptian authorities that restrict and inform--to put it mildly--the activities of women’s organizations in Egypt (Abdelrahman, 2005). The present study, therefore, seconds Badawi’s (2007) suggestion that women’s organizations in Egypt not depend on foreign funds and instead self-fund by starting their own projects.