Making African NGOS more responsive to social needs

Abstract

The development of institutionalized voluntary sector or the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa is a complementary response to the shortfall in public sector provision. But that development was made possible because of the existence of communitarian principles of advocacy, obligation and responsibility, already practised in the extended family before the arrival of the European Christian missions. The success of foreign NGOs is due to the management principles of openness, accountability and non-distributiveness demonstrated in their operations. It is proposed that African NGOs should apply their communitarian principles to these management principles, so as to become more responsive to the needs of their people. In this way African NGOs will be able to tap into their local resource base to fund more good causes as well as contributing towards an inclusive and sustainable bottom-up democratic welfare system.


African Journal of Social Work Vol.17(1) 2002: 39-58