NGO-led village development in Egypt: An enduring discourse

Rural Egypt has suffered from poverty for a long time, and several measures including governmental initiatives have been taken towards poverty alleviation. The most recent rural development initiative is a collaboration between the government and NGOs which target villages in which more than 70% of inhabitants are under the poverty line. This initiative came thirteen years after the first thrust of similar NGO-led rural village development targeting poor villages whose activities and impacts all fell short of their comprehensive plans.
This research provides an understanding of the reasons for the continuity of NGO-led village development programmes despite their repeated failure over the period from 2007 onwards and through major political and economic changes that occurred within the same timeframe. To address the issue of continuity, this research analyses those programmes with regard to their ideas, visions, and processes, drawing on Hajer’s (1995) approach to view the rural development programmes as a discourse.
This research adopts a discursive institutionalist approach, underpinned by critical realism, to examine how various structures have interacted with the agency of all those involved to sustain this discourse of development. Working with the concept of aid chains, the research investigates the understandings and motivations of not only the principal decision-makers, but also all the actors within the aid chains, including beneficiaries and their lived experiences. It adopts two qualitative methodological approaches; of interviews and documentary analysis, to address the question ‘How do actors and institutional factors interact to sustain a discourse of NGO-led development in rural Egypt?’ The research defines the discourse and identifies the actors as well as institutional factors that sustain the discourse at each level of the aid chain. Reasons for the institutionalization and therefore the continuity of the discourse are found to be a result of a broad match between the discourse’s ideas, visions, and processes, and the institutional, cultural, religious, and political aspects of rural Egypt.