ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies recent initiatives taken by NGOs and NARS to respond to their institutional and operational weaknesses, and to take advantage of each other’s strengths. NGOs have paid increasing attention to their own limitations as development institutions. The chapter reviews the ways in which NGOs have sought to address the failings they see in the NARS and in their own ATD activities. It focuses on changes that have been occurring in the public sectors of the region. The chapter suggests that these changes are fundamental in character, and that they point towards future relationships between NARS and NGOs that will differ greatly from those of the past. Most NGOs have been critical of the public sector’s approach to agricultural development. In recent workshops, NGOs have noted their need for access to programmes of peasant-centred agricultural technology development to generate the technologies they lack the capacity to develop.
