Non Governmental Organizations Case Study

Non-governmental Organizations (NGO) cover a range of organizations within civil society; hence its clear definition remains contested. However, NGOs are often referred to as private, voluntary and non-profit organizations that pursue activities to relieve suffering, promote the interest of the poor, protect the environment, provide basic social services or undertake community development based on the principles of altruism and voluntarism (World Bank, 2007). NGOs here refer to organizations that are separate from government agency engaged in activities that will help the public (Opoku-Mensah, 2007; Salamon and Anheier 1996). Borrowing liberally from the World Bank’s necessarily vague Operational Directive 14.70, Eric & Faisal, 2007, define

Notwithstanding the need for scaling-up development strategies of NGOs operating in African regions, there exist empirical evidence to confirm that, within several rural and urban communities, NGOs activities have led to significant increase in health and educational facilities, improved access to potable water sources, provision of employment opportunities and employable skills, which ultimately have improved the quality of lives for people and other vulnerable groups, particularly women and children. Wamani (2007) has indicated that, regarding the provision of affordable health care for the poor, NGOs provide about 14 to 50 percent of both curative and preventive health and medical services in most developing countries, especially in Kenya. In both the health and educational sectors, NGOs such as World Vision and Plan International continue to receive recognition through the application of complementary systems to support the efforts of the government in reaching the underserved in rural marginalized communities (Farrel and Hartwell,

The International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in 1863 in the aftermath of the Crimean war. During World War I and World War II, new NGOs devoted to humanitarian and development goals surfaced, including Save the Children Fund in 1917, Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (which is now Oxfam) in 1942, and CARE in 1945. Particularly, NGOs have played a growing role in development since the end of World War II. The amount of discretionary funding that high-income countries have given to Non-governmental organizations to promote international development assistance has risen from a negligible amount before 1980 to nearly $2 billion in 2004 (OECD, 2006a), with an early spike around the 1984 – 85 Ethiopian