Organisational effectiveness as a panacea to enhance public good: a nongovernmental organisations' perspective

[摘要] ENGLISH SUMMARY : Nongovernmental Organisations (NGOs) have been an important part of the development project in many countries. The need to organise in the form of NGOs comes from a call for collective action in dealing with the many social, economic and environmental problems that the world faces. NGOs have been particularly important in the South African context, during the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. With South Africa becoming a fully-fledged democracy in 1994, apartheid legislation in the form of the Fundraising Act (No. 107 of 1978) was repealed to make way for the Nonprofit Organisations Act (No. 71 of 1997) that sought to make the operations and functioning of NGOs easier and more effective.Due to the first major world economic and financial crisis of the new millennium, NGOs also suffered as limited funds from private donors and governments were now available for the funding of NGOs. This created a situation where NGOs had to fundamentally rethink their operations and functioning, and to ultimately become more organisationally effective.This study traces the evolution of NGOs, as well as the concept of Organisational Effectiveness (OE). It explores the benefits that NGOs can derive from actively pursuing organisational management strategies such as Business Process Reengineering (BPR) in the quest to become organisationally more effective.The study was qualitative in nature and followed a case study research design. A self-completion questionnaire was used to gather information from the NGOs, while the researcher also had access to documents such as annual reports and programme outlines. The two cases selected were NGOs operating in the Stellenbosch region of South Africa, namely, Good Hope Psychological Services (GHPS) and Women on Farms (WFP). GHPS gives free psychological and counselling services to previously disadvantaged individuals and families in the Cape Winelands region, while WFP strives for the upliftment and empowerment of women that work on farms in the same region.The study identified various obstacles that inhibit NGOs from being organisationally effective. These include the following inter alia: a lack of / limited funding, problems with governance, and a lack of strategic planning. To remedy this situation, the researcher suggest that NGOs use the Organisational Effectiveness Checklist (OEC) to identify obstacles to OE specific to their context and organisational arrangements and to implement a BPR process to clear the identified obstacles in a bid to become more organisationally effective.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University