English: Julian Parr is the Regional Manager South East Asia, Oxfam GB. He was interviewed by the Eugad project team in 2010.

NGOs are really having to define their role in a new world order, particularly international NGOs, like Oxfam where we have traditionally capacity built south based organisations for 60-70 years. So the question for us is what is our role now. NGOs cannot continue to deliver services because they undermine the role of the state in doing so. So challenges for big NGOs like BRAC or Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is that they do an awful lot of service delivery that in fact government should do. So my own sense in working for NGOs is that we are moving much more to policy and advocacy and that is the real role we should be playing. We should be arguing to governments like India, that you should be putting in more than 1% of your GDP growth into health, for example, and that is where we have a strong and valid voice – it is about accountability and transparency of governments on how they operate, how they spend aid and where they invest for the future.

See his full interview in ⇒ Julian Parr