The role of NGO”S in development Africa

The literature on development has long recognized the importance of the third sector. Throughout the 1980s there was an evident and growing enthusiasm for the contribution of NGOs particularly for their ability to work directly with the poor and with grassroots organisations (Turner,1988; Gorman,1984). According to Carroll (1992), it was in 1985 that official development agencies arrived at the same conclusion that the advantages of NGOs, such as flexibility, informality, commitment, and participatory style, outweighed their disadvantages and made them especially suited for the complex task of rural development projects aimed at alleviating poverty, in which physical capital is combined with human and organizational resources. By the end of the 1980s, reports from the OECD (1988), Asian Development Bank (1990, 1991) and World Bank (1991) all argued that NGOs have a particular ability to work effectively with the poorest communities.

The early 1990s saw a distinct change in emphasis, with greater weight being placed on the term civil society than on non-governmental organisation. Although this change cannot be attributed to any single factor, a number of emerging concerns may offer some insights. The work of authors such as Putnam (1993) showed the importance of non-governmental and non-private sector institutions and demonstrated that it would be useful to work with wider definitions than were typically being used. Third, it was recognized that many informal self-help groups of local citizens were important in promoting and achieving social change but that conventional definitions of the voluntary sector often excluded such associations. Finally, the legitimacy of some NGOs as agencies financed by external sources has been called into question (Hulme and Edwards,1997a). Whilst the term NGOs continued to be used, sometimes