I recently resigned from my job with a non-governmental organisation in Africa. After years of working in the sector, I have been left disillusioned with the ethos and impact of these organisations.

The sector is filled with the wrong people with the wrong motivations and the wrong agenda. It is, after all, a business enterprise worth $27.3bn, at least in 2016. Missions in country are incentivised by money. The more you can raise, the happier your colleagues in the region and in headquarters because some of that money goes into paying their salaries and office rents – and your performance in the country is linked to that, rather than the quality of the programmes you are running.

In the eyes of senior management, a successful humanitarian operation is based on two key indicators: how much money you raise with the donors and how many beneficiaries you have reached with the aid money you have been given. However, in my experience, what is not measured is how well you have managed projects in addressing the real needs of the intended recipients, how accountable you have been to them, and how quickly you have been able to address their urgent needs in humanitarian emergencies.

For example, little to no progress was made with one project for months, even though emergency funding had already been secured to address the food and water requirements of people in desperate need. For months on end, the project was dormant. No aid was delivered. No families were helped. Mismanagement meant that most of the funding that was given for alleviating the pain and suffering caused by food insecurity was already spent to pay staff salaries and benefits. No cash for the purpose of buying food was given, and no buckets and no soap were provided.

However, most alarmingly, no one at the organisation felt compelled to implement this project. There was no sense of urgency, no sense of responsibility and no obligation to assist people on the brink of famine. Months passed before anything happened. The project seemed to just fall through the cracks.

More shockingly, one senior member of staff – who is responsible for the quality of delivery of such programmes – only seemed to take notice that the project was failing because the donor deadline for the completion of the project was fast approaching, and we had zero achievements to report back. More energy was then directed into saving the NGO’s image in the eyes of the donor, and concocting unrealistic justifications for how we spent all the money allotted to staff salaries and field trips. Yet we had no concrete results to justify these expenses.

Furthermore, creative thinking is not encouraged. The best way to survive is to play internal politics and tow the party line. Get more money and run programmes the way they have always been run. There is little room to work on improving their quality. Proposed plans towards accessing areas where humanitarian needs are high, and which have been largely left untouched by most humanitarian organisations are discouraged. Trying to review and change the methodology we use to assess vulnerability of displaced people is discouraged. The best policy is to carry on with the way programmes have been run regardless of how dysfunctional they have been.

How is “dissent” dealt with? Quite simply, by character assassination. Once you have fallen foul of the game of internal politics – a sad reality in a sector that is supposed to leave that behind and be united in its work reaching the same simple objective – energy of senior staff is directed to undermining your reputation with your colleagues. I have had my own experience of this: when I contradicted one senior member of staff over a particular approach he wanted to take, he yelled at me in front of some of my team. When I escalated this incident as a breach of our code of conduct, no action was taken.

In short, the industry is largely overrun by narrow-minded, power-hungry individuals who are more interested in leading a comfortable, well-paid life based in the capital cities of these conflict-torn places than in working to uphold humanitarian principles towards beneficiaries and staff. They dominate the industry. Those few in between who try to implement more accountable projects will have a constant fight ahead of them. Good luck!