ABSTRACT

The Villa El Salvador Health project illustrates two main areas in which Peruvian NGOs can be seen to have a potential comparative advantage in relation to government as a channel for development assistance:

the capacity to develop innovative and more appropriate policy proposals from field experience, for eventual use by the public sector, by other NGOs and by community organisations. Peru is an extremely heterogeneous country, and government officials in Lima often have little information and understanding of the reality experienced by the population of the rest of the country, even in Lima’s shanty towns.

the development of a much closer relationship with the population of a given area, which enables NGOs to strengthen popular organisations, respond to people’s needs, facilitate meaningful participation by ‘beneficiaries’, and target their assistance at the poorest sections of the population (Tendler 1982).