Overview of the point discussed
Today civil societies become an integral part of the human life. Civil societies are highly interactive with the community. Non-governmental organizations help in the people who are in need during war, famine, natural disaster, poverty and rehabilitation. So Non-governmental organizations influence the people in a very large scale. Therefore Non-governmental Organizations become a good cover for hidden agendas of some rivalry governments and organization all around the world. As well as NGOs may suffer many other obstacle in their process which divert them from their mission. This mission drift has become a major threat for an NGO. Mission drift is mainly caused by the external pressure groups. Financial sources, government, environmentalist movement, competitive NGOs are some of the pressure group which became the reason for mission drift.
The Process
I was absent for the tutorial when the lecturer divided the groups. So I was missed out. Finally I ended up with two others who were also missed out, Yasir from Afghanistan and Hamdhan from Maldives. When we discussed about the topics first we discussed about “The effects of Civil Society in the Society” and “Women Rights”. But these were the topics which discussed many times. So we planned to do a topic which others do not. Therefore we planned to do a negative topic. So we planned to do The Role of NGOs and the Concept of Mission Drift.
In role playing I was asked to be the moderator. And other two became panelist. Hamdhan played the role of an NGO activist, and Yasir played the role of Jounalist from CNN. The major threat about my part is making the panel discussion as continuous process. So I had to make slight changes in the questions which the panelist were to answer.
Implementation
Our panel was the last to do the discussion in our tutorial group. I felt very nervous in this panel. I am usually a lousy starter and built up on the later stage. But the part of moderator is not so much to speak. So it was a negative for me. But after finishing my introduction part I felt bit confident. But during the discussion we helped each other, so it was bit easy for us. The main external issue was the audience. Our group was the last so the class mates were feeling tired and they were exhausted. So we get very little response from the class.
Learning and reflection on panel discussion and Conclusion
I learn a lot about the mission drift and negative impacts of NGO through this panel discussion. This is the first time I was exposed to the negative sides of the NGOs. It was bit hard to digest actually.
Panel Discussion in our course is giving us more information about the world – as Civil Society is connecting people around the world. We tend to know about the others people difficult moment either they were victim of poverty, catastrophe, hunger or diseases; around the globe. At the same time we will help them to reduce their problems as most of student had found the alternative solution in each of the issues in their panel discussion. But honestly panel discussion is quite boring and we had done it since foundation; we need something new to explore, such as make the video about the topic we had choose, and we could put the video on the Administration building so that not only student also the staff could get the facts about it. Or we also could do any others creative thing – which can be last longer such as Book.
Reference 1. http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs/ngocivil.php
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-governmental_organization
3. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2072157
4. http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/5/0/1/7/5/pages501758/p501758-6.php
Mohamed Zaveem Shifran