NGOs and sustainable rural development: experience from Upper West Region of Ghana

Rural communities in Ghana are deprived of basic social amenities, infrastructure and livelihood skills. The absence of these amenities and skills has widened inequality between rural and urban spaces in the country. The situation is worse in the northern part compared to the southern part of Ghana. The government and its development partners have made efforts to bridge this inequality and to make the development of rural communities sustainable. In this study, we explored the activities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in sustaining rural livelihoods in Upper West Region (UWR) of Ghana. Three basic questions that motivated the study are: what are the various interventions of NGOs in rural communities in the UWR?; how is sustainability built in the overall intervention programmes of the NGOs?; and what challenges do rural NGOs face in their operations? We purposively selected five NGOs operating in the region for the study. Simple random and purposive sampling techniques were used to select 194 respondents made up of beneficiaries and officials of the NGOs. The results from the study have shown that intervention programmes have contributed positively in improving economic, health, sanitation, social and political lives of beneficiaries in the studied communities. The study, however, found that there were no systems in place to sustain some interventions once programmes implementation periods are over. The low sustainability of the NGO intervention programmes was attributed to the many challenges they face. Prominent among them were cultural believes and practices, inadequate funding and logistical constraints. Recommendations are made to help NGOs and various stakeholders in rural development to sustain projects in order to achieve desired poverty reduction in rural areas.