People power

He adds that being international doesn't necessarily mean extending financial assistance to other countries but also means in having operational and long-term projects in these nations along with representative offices.

Since March 2011, nearly $3.5 million raised by WECBA has gone toward the construction of 17 schools in Tanzania, Kenya and Burundi. Thousands of African children in these low-income countries have benefited immensely from the project.

Yan Shi, deputy director of the department of Project Hope for Africa with CYDF, says the demand for help in Africa is quite strong.

"Many of the rural schools we visited in Africa are made of mud and animal dung. There is even one school in Kenya, which has no walls at all, and is just a blackboard under a tree with some stones on the ground for children to sit on," he says.

Yan, who worked for Project Hope China between 2008 and 2011, a program that has built around 17,900 schools in China since 1989, says in terms of help, the landscape in China and poor countries in Africa is quite different. "Project Hope in China has increasingly involved constructing schools to equipping schools with computers and other facilities, including training rural teachers, while the demand in Africa is still at the stage of school construction," Yan says.

Academics and insiders in NGOs say that China has progressed rapidly to something that is in between a developed economy and a developing economy, which means Chinese NGOs are in a better position to help, and the experiences they gather in their operation in China suit African situation better than their Western counterparts.

Karla Simon, a law professor at the Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America, and an expert in civil society of China, says Chinese NGOs are closer in terms of their development to African NGOs, compared with Western NGOs.

"The civil society movement in China is really quite young. Nobody had heard of the term NGO until 1995 in China. But I think Chinese NGOs have a lot to bring to Africa as they are relatively recent," the Washington DC-based Simon says.

He Wen, director of project management center with the Amity Foundation, agrees, saying compared with NGOs from Western countries, it is easier for Chinese NGOs to fit their skills into African society because poverty alleviation is a much more recent event than in the West.

Since 2011, He's Nanjing-based foundation has trained dozens of people from Madagascar the skills of building biogas digesters and provided the country with 263 units of equipment for the building of biogas digesters in rural areas.

"A biogas digester, a practical equipment that turns organic waste into usable fuel, is very popular in rural China. We can take more useful technologies from rural China to meet demand in Africa. Western countries are quite developed and many of their skills may not fit into the African context quite well," he says.

However, every coin has two sides. The advantages can easily turn into disadvantages. Wu from the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation says that the young civil society in China can also means inexperienced NGOs.

"We haven't been engaged in international relations as long as Western NGOs. Western NGOs have been in Africa for 10 or 20 years. We don't have local contacts, we don't have enough talented people qualified to work overseas and we know nothing about running a project in Africa," Wu says, adding they need to learn everything from the beginning and build a whole operational system from scratch.

For example, even to prepare the paperwork for refundable tax, which is used when donations arrive in Africa, can prove to be a challenge, Wu says.

Wu's organization built a hospital in Sudan in 2011 with financial support from China National Petroleum Corporation and is keen to make the country the frontier for its overseas operations in Africa. It also plans to set up its first overseas office in Sudan.

Language barrier is another issue. Elfas Mcloud Zadzagomo Shangwa, founder of the New Hope Foundation in Zimbabwe, which has cooperated with four Chinese NGOs over the past four years on various projects, says his organization is willing to cooperate with China because the help from Chinese NGOs is more "practical" and comes with "no strings attached".

However, approaching Chinese NGOs and foundations is not easy. "It is like climbing the Great Wall of China. They do not respond to our letters of invitation due to the language barrier," he says.

Moreover, he says, having cooperated with the China Family Planning Association on seminars about HIV/AIDS prevention in 2010 and 2011, the program was too short. "It was a three-day seminar and the main highlight was financial support for the project. The funding was less than what was needed for the project."

Hong Ping, director of international cooperation department with CFPA, who was in charge of the HIV/AIDS program in Zimbabwe, says funding is still the main challenge that is preventing her organization from going to Africa.

"We don't have budgets specially set for Africa and compared with other poor countries in Asia, it is more expensive to carry out projects in Africa. The traveling costs alone are very high," Hong says, adding paucity of funds as the main reason for scaling back on African projects last year. She says she has no idea whether CFPA will make a trip to Africa this year, despite getting an invitation from Zimbabwe.

Despite strong demand from Africa, not all Chinese NGOs that have ambitions to run long-term projects in Africa have enough funds.

Zhang from Red Cross China says though the government offers huge amount of official development assistance to Africa, media reports indicate that official development aid from China to Africa is more than the aid from the World Bank, very little of it percolates down to Chinese NGOs.

"The Ministry of Commerce in China is in charge of ODA and a big proportion of the money has been used to build infrastructure, rather than public welfare projects," Zhang says, adding this is the reason she has set her eyes on the increasing number of Chinese companies in Africa.