Socio-economic Development: The Community Based NGOs Perspective

The presence of weak local government structures in terms of infrastructure, human and financial resources have rendered them unresponsive to people¿s suffering in much of Africa and Uganda in particular. This phenomenon has culminated into poor socioeconomic welfare of citizens as manifested in poor health and education provision, unemployment and poverty especially in rural areas of eastern Uganda which has the second highest poverty rate of all the regions of Uganda and to be specific Bugiri district in which this study was done. The interesting question here is, how do citizens cope with such poor socioeconomic welfare? The answer to this question seems to lie in Community initiatives in form of NGOs. However, recent studies by The World Bank have pointed out weakness in NGOs development work in regard to impact and sustainability. This was the basis upon which this study was conducted to prove or disapprove the above studies. Finally, this book makes some recommendations based on the findings and the critical one being how NGOs can raise finances locally if they are to save themselves from the challenges associated with financial dependency.