The role of NGOs in Canada and USA in the transformation of the socio-cultural structures in Africa.

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 reference to Africa. The process begins at the local community level with ordinary citizens in North America. These people are exposed to 'development pornography' though 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) - charities, aid workers, business people, missionaries and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) - in 'intervening' in the African continent's seemingly ineworable 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, foods and time are donated by ordinary people to help re-make the so-called inferior traditional lifeworlds of Africans in accordance with Western visions.