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Record W2136309912 · doi:10.4314/ad.v32i2.57176

4 - The Role of NGOs in Canada and the USA in the Transformation of the Socio-Cultural Structures in Africa

2007· article· en· W2136309912 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueAfrica Development · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicTourism, Volunteerism, and Development
Canadian institutionsUniversity of the Fraser Valley
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHegemonyModernization theoryPolitical scienceSociologyGlobalizationPolitical economyEconomic growthDevelopment economicsLawPoliticsEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This paper aims to explain how International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) in Canada and the United States of America assist in maintaining the West’s hegemonic position in ongoing globalisation process, with specific ref- erence to Africa. The process begins at the local community level with ordinary citizens in North America. These people are exposed to ‘development pornogra- phy’ through a plethora of visual, text and audio input via the mass media and popular culture, which present the African lifeworld as inferior and primitive, and African people as helpless, hapless, and in the throes of an unending series of epidemics on the short road to extinction. African cultures are portrayed as backward, atavistic, stuck in their primeval past, and needing ‘modernisation’ from the West. This African lifeworld is used to describe and portray Africa in ways that justify the importance of civil society organisations (CSOs) – chari- ties, aid workers, business people, missionaries and non-governmental organi- sations (NGOs) – in ‘intervening’ in the African continent’s seemingly inexora- ble human crises. INGOs, in turn, use this image as ‘compassion usury’, tugging on the heartstrings of North Americans to donate generously to various projects in Africa. Large amounts of money, goods and time are donated by ordinary people to help re-make the so-called inferior traditional lifeworlds of Africans in accordance with Western visions. In return, these donors receive generous rewards for their contributions, in the form of tax deductions, community recognition, and development fund awards. Many of these donors are so motivated that they become development tourists who regularly visit Africa, bringing back ‘mercy-soliciting’ images to raise funds and create jobs for NGOs. Horrific pic- tures further reinforce negative stereotypes and misconceptions about Africa. In this way CSOs, particularly those recognised in Canada and the USA as interna- tional NGOs, not only unwittingly export and impose North American values on Africans, but also serve and maintain the global status quo of Western hegemony and African dependence.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.677
Threshold uncertainty score0.472

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.230
Teacher spread0.219 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it