ABSTRACT
The world is engaged in a war, and the enemy is poverty, an enemy which robs adults of their youth and children of their lives. After years of low-level warfare, both the generals and the public have become shell-shocked, inured to battle. In the absence of fair, intelligent and consistent approaches to the issue of technology by large bilateral and multilateral donor agencies, and in light of the single-minded enthusiasm with which they pursue policy lending, despair might seem the most logical response. Most large donor organizations are unsuited to labour-intensive small-scale interventions that require programming flexibility and time. Non-governmental organizations (NGO) are a key source of research and development for appropriate technologies, techniques and approaches. Those NGOs that can overcome traditional NGO abhorrence of the profit motive perhaps have an increasingly important role to play with microenterprises.
