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Although NGO’s are appraised for their tremendous work, other scholars have opined that they do not see their essence due to the fact that many have fallen below expectations. In this Chapter, however, researcher’s task is to review the literature of other scholarly works as it relate to NGO’s roles in poverty alleviation.
Desai (2005) has mentioned that NGOs have an important role to play in supporting women, men and households, community groups, civil society groups and expected that they can meet the welfare.
She accounted some role and functions for NGOs, such as counseling and support service, awareness raising and advocacy, legal aid and microfinance. These services help the people to achieve their ability, skill and knowledge, and take control over their own lives and finally become empowered and self-reliance. I agree with the author, because if a project like microfinance is enforced, the living standard of people will be improved. This evidence will be seen in the next chapter.
Strom quits (2002) has also noted three major functions for NGOs such as (service delivery (e.g. relief, welfare, basic skills); educational provision (e.g. basic skills and often critical analysis of social environments); and public policy advocacy as this is the case with NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Baccaro (2001), in his writing depicted how particular NGOs with a definite mission statements can promote the organization and “empowerment” of the poor, particularly poor women, through a combination of micro-credit, awareness-raising, training for group members which is capacity building and other social services, with an aim to reduce poverty among societies.
NGOs general aim is to alleviate poverty through activities that promote capacity building and self-reliance. Langran (2002) has mentioned that NGOs through capacity building help to sustain community development assist government in the provision of basic social amenities. NGOs are often created in order to expand the capacities of people and government there by breaching the gap of poverty (Korten 1990).
NGOs are praised for promoting community self-reliance and empowerment through supporting community-based groups and relying on participatory processes (Korten 1990; Clark 1991; Friedmann 1992; Fowler 1993; Edwards and Hulme 1994; Salamon 1994).In Sub-Saharan Africa for instance where survival for daily bread is a major hurdle, NGOs have been seen as liberators of human suffering the evidence is in Sierra Leone were sixty percent of citizens survival dependent upon donors.
Sustainable development, on the other hand, has emerged over the past few decades as an important paradigm for poverty alleviation.
As Bradshaw and Winn (2000) have noted, sustainability is rooted largely in an environmental approach, particularly in the industrialized countries. But, the goal of sustainable development is to find a balance between three pillars – social, economic and environmental – of communities (Sneddon 2000).
Hibbard and Tang (2004) in their study in Vietnam have noted the importance of NGOs’ roles in sustainable community development. One of the roles was that NGOs balance the social, economic and environmental factors in promoting sustainable development.
Another important role of NGO that they discovered was decentralization of the central government which helps the local communities to acquire more power in order to make their own decisions. As in the case of Sierra Leone where civil society groups and other NGOs like MERLIN, Caritas and CRS, have succeeded in winning bills for decentralization in the Health ministry. But, sometimes the local communities lack specialists to do professional work and resources that are important for the particular projects. In this situation, NGO assists local staff with drafting sustainable development plans that are functional under the umbrella of a central government policy.
Finally, they concluded that poverty alleviation is process-oriented, and it requires extensive community participation and relies on network to share resources, knowledge and expertise. From the literatures, it could be summarized that NGOs play an important function in fighting poverty via promoting sustainable community development.
Sustainable community development emphasizes on a balance between environmental concerns and development objectives, while simultaneously enhancing local social relationships.
Sustainable communities meet the economic needs of their residents, enhance and protect the environment, and promote more human local societies (Bridger and Luloff 1997).
Through the functions of providing microfinance, initiating capacity building and self -reliance, peace building projects, relief services during emergencies, NGOs could bridge the gap of poverty in Sub-Saharan African. Below are the reviews of NGO’s roles, functions and strategies they used to fight poverty.