Creating a national NGO council for strengthening social welfare services in Africa: Some organizational and technical problems experienced in Malawi
| Date | 01 December 1992 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230120502 |
| Author | H. P. M. Simukonda |
| Published date | 01 December 1992 |
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, VOL. 12,417431 (1992)
Creating a national
NGO
council for strengthening social
welfare services
in
Africa: some organizational and technical
problems experienced
in
Malawi
H.
P.
M. SIMUKONDA
University
of
Malawi
SUMMARY
In 1985, Malawi’s social welfare organizations formed the Council for Social Welfare Services
in an attempt to strengthen the delivery of social welfare services to the underprivileged.
This was to be achieved with more formalized, co-ordinated functioning among organizations
and a better system for assessing the technical, financial and training needs of the organizations
and the population and for meeting them. This paper examines the feasibility of finding
such an organization that works. It focuses on problems such as the heterogeneity of social
welfare organizations in terms
of
origin, objective guidelines and operational cultures, as
well as the feasibility
of
getting the necessary co-operation to strengthen the council’s resource
and authority capacity to meet its own objectives. The overall view in this paper is that
the council has a long way to go before it achieves the situation for which it stands, if that
is at all possible, because
of
the idiosyncratic nature
of
social welfare organizations.
INTRODUCTION
Social welfare and development have gained considerable importance in the Third
World, particularly in Africa since independence. This strong recognition has been
consistent with governments overriding concern with the problem of poverty and
with the need to achieve rapid socio-economic development. Accordingly, special
ministries, departments and statutory bodies have been created to deal with specific
aspects of the problem. But perhaps of greater interest is the rapid development
of
interest in this field shown by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), supported
or supplemented by agencies
of
inter-governmental organisations (IGOs) and foreign
governments. This latter category has been driven by socioeconomic, spiritual or
ideological concerns with the problem
of
Third World development needs or human
suffering and underprivilege. In Malawi, the main impetus has been provided by
the recent influx
of
refugees from neighbouring war-torn Mozambique, now number-
ing more than half a million. Another interesting development was the creation
in
1985
of a voluntary national council of social welfare as an NGO, which was
an attempt to bring about an improvement in social welfare delivery by co-ordinating
the activities of all bodies engaged in welfare.
The pertinence of the creation
of
the ‘Council for Social Welfare Services’ in
Malawi was the sheer number
of
such organizations; the wide differences in their
Dr Simukonda is a lecturer in public administration at Chancellor College, University
of
Malawi, P.O.
Box 280, Zomba, Malawi.
027
1-2075/92/05O417-15$12.50
0
1992 by John Wiley
&
Sons, Ltd.
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