SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter discusses the non-governmental organization (NGO) specifically, not civil society more broadly, nor the voluntary sector in its entirety. The rise of the voluntary sector in sub-Saharan Africa was linked, by many, to this new organizational type. The origins of the formal voluntary sector lay in the division of social welfare responsibility in many African colonies between state and mission actors during the first half of the twentieth century. In the Belgian Congo, for example, the colonial state relied upon a mix of state and voluntary healthcare providers. The famine in the Congo was no natural disaster, but rather hunger and starvation wrought by state collapse and the violent politics of decolonization. As NGOs were discovering their own areas of potential competitive advantage, international development policy was undergoing a seismic shift. It was seismic shift that influenced the next phase in the evolution of the NGO sector: the rise of NGOs as civil society actors.