Others from Wednesday Afternoon's Session

Lester Salamon, the Director of the Centre for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies talked a lot about the economic impact NGOs have on the GDPs of their countries. Some mind-boggling figures on Civil Society’s impact include:

They employ 48.4 million workers in 40 countries

They constitute 5% of the work force in the US and 8% of the workforce in Canada (more than the construction industry, more than the extractive industries)

In 2004 the represented $1.9 Trillion in expenditures.

Unfortunately, this economic impact often goes unnoticed. Mr. Salamon reminds us that "what isn't counted doesn't count" and urges us to work to make it count in accounting schemes and media portraits of the NGO sector.


One of the craziest jobs I've ever heard of was represented on the panel by Mal Nuhu Ribadu who is the executive chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in Nigeria. Mr. Ribadu contended that good governace was largely dependent on the NGO community, especially in countries which do not have the standard of government that most modern democracies are used to. He stressed that struggling countries should not look to outsiders to fix their woes but rather they must, it is imperitve, that they look within and build their capacity to govern. Some astounding facts: before Mr. Ribadu became the executive secretary in 2003, there were NO, zilch, zero, corruption convictions in Nigeria, since 2003 there have been 80 such convictions.