The organizations have clear guidelines with respect to service delivery. The major problem is that there are no internal auditors that have been employed by the organizations. The organizations rely on external auditors only. Thus there is need for the organizations to recruit internal auditors of stock and finances. This also helps in the reduction of corrupt activities and account fixing on the part of the senior management. Financial reports are not prepared timeously. There is tendency on of late submission of annual and periodic reports to donors. Failure to meet specified deadlines for reports will result in late disbursements of funds from donors. Annual financial reports should be published and disseminated to stakeholders to allow them to make informed comments and participate in key decision making.
Founder member syndrome refers to the dynamics that develops when the founding leaders of the organization, whose vision, high energy and personal charisma was critical to organizing and launching a new organization , becomes a block to continuing growth and development of the organization. This syndrome prevails in the studied organizations. Each stage of development of an organization requires different skills, expertise, leadership styles and personal qualities. The conflicts that arise are patterned and in most instances nothing is done to manage the necessary transition to a more stable and structured leadership team. This sometimes led to early demise of what could have become a great, well recognized organization.
The founders of NGOs often do not want to adopt the more formal (`bureaucratic’) structures that are implied by rapid growth in funding and in the diversity of donor sources. Why should they accept the `institutionalized suspicion’ that the new professionals represent that include strict external auditing; recruitment of personnel by open competition; submission of frequent detailed reports to funders; formal minutes of meetings; and elaborate measurement and reporting of the `impacts’ and `outcomes’ of their activities?
Founders may suspect that all this is an excuse to place power, authority, and perhaps even illicit resources, in the hands of the incoming professional managers, accountants, and impact evaluation specialists. Their suspicions may be true, but that is a matter of individual cases. The fact is that `institutionalized suspicion’ is essential to the proper functioning of any large-scale organization and especially to one that, like all development NGOs, has a significant public dimension. Starting an organization requires founders to master two primary challenges.
Essential resources must be found and secondly governance and administrative structures need to be established in a way that allows the organization to evolve into a formal organization.71 One of the challenges for the organization is to move from a small organization based on the entrepreneurial skills of one or two original founders, to a larger more complex organization which operates by formal or well established policies and which involves a broad representation of the organizations members.
The understanding of governance issues within the organizations is weak. Induction and training of governing bodies is practically non existent. The founder member syndrome is rampant. The leadership wrangles among older founder members puts off young professionals. There are inadequate programming capacities. This is because of lack of competent technical staff in the areas of project and program design and management.
Conclusion
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