Abstract:
On a rainy April morning in 2016, Kamene and Nekesa met for coffee at Artcaffe in Lang’ata Nairobi. The former university classmates reminisced about old times, dreams of entrepreneurship, and discussed business ideas. The pair met again the following week to hash out their concept of developing a rankings website whereby they would rank from number one down to one thousand all the largest NGOs in the world. Then with the ranking website business, they would sell advertising and reports.
Kamene and Nekesa next had to develop the criteria for how they would rank NGOs. Suppose they decided to list the NGOs, organisations with more employees ranked the highest because more staff meant more people would visit the NGO’s website. Then the ladies decided another ranking criterion would be the number of countries an NGO worked in followed by the diversity of management and the board of directors.
Suppose that Kamene and Nekesa’s business went viral in 2017 and by 2021 hundreds of NGOs regularly bragged about their rankings received on the website. However, what if many NGOs fail to stop and investigate what the three criteria for ranking comprised? The shallow criteria would not give a real picture of NGO quality, impact, breadth, and depth.
Description:
A Newspaper article by Scott Bellows, an Assistant Professor in the Chandaria School of Business at USIU-Africa. Full article: https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/bd/lifestyle/personal-finance/how-varsities-duped-with-bogus-rankings-3278838