Together We Stand

[ 56 ] their life circumstances in a way that increases people’s sense towards their own values and capacities to be able to take life- improving actions and live a more integrated life.” The idea of empowering marginalized people aims at involving such groups in the process of development and devel- opmental planning; as such process will be incomplete if kept limited to the priorities of political elites and decision makers. This concept is commensurate with the programmes of sustainable human development, partnership, empowerment, integrating marginalized groups and planning for develop- ment. Apparently, the concept seeks to enhance planners’ belief that there is no development without the marginalized groups, as the golden rule of community organization says ‘never do for others what they can do for themselves’. Thus, empowerment is a participatory path by definition. Recently, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have emerged as a main player in development, especially after the unprecedented growth in their number, size and fields. For example, the USA hosts 2 million NGOs, India hosts 1 million grass-roots organizations and Eastern Europe has 100,000 organ- izations established during 1988-1995. It is worth mentioning that although NGOs have existed since the beginning of the nine- teenth century and addressed issues such as anti-slavery, the last few years have witnessed a pivotal leap in the quantity and quality of the NGOs’ reality. This has led Professor Lester M. Salamon to call this phenomenon “the global associational revolution” which redefines the NGOs’ role in development and considers them a genuine means to represent marginalized groups. Moreover, some researchers believe that NGOs enjoy many comparative advantages that enable them to be more effective than both governments and markets in resource allocation and development process. Researchers list some advantages of NGOs, including their ability to follow more effective methods to reach orphans; respond to developmental needs of local communities flexibly, contrary to bureaucracy which is governed by strict institutional rules; employ creative skills to tackle problems; provide services with low costs; attract financing and deal directly with people by adapting commu- nity-based participatory approaches. Transformations are not only limited to the quantitative growth of NGOs, rather the quality of the activities delivered by such organizations has improved. Gradually, civil society has emerged and NGOs have emanated as part of the alternative development. The new challenge faced by NGOs now is to achieve political and social freedom, alleviate poverty and empower marginalized groups after being criticized that they only responded to peoples’ needs and did not defend their rights. A new generation of organizations has emerged to play an enlightening role in the fields of human, women’s, children’s and marginalized groups’ rights. Additionally, interest has been paid to fighting poverty and a new approach has been adopted to address the issue based on the idea of empowerment rather than a mere provision of charitable aid. Some coun- tries have paid great interest to fighting unemployment, thus NGOs in these countries focus on training and microfinancing. Furthermore, new forms of organizations have been established to fill the gap left by states in the fields of health, education and other social services. Other NGOs have focused on facing nega- tive social phenomena including child labour, street children and addiction. The bottom line is that there are some positive signs represented by the quantitative growth of NGOs and the qualitative leap of their approaches in dealing with reality. The experiences of different countries indicate the importance of relying on voluntary organizations as a strategic partner to Image: IIROSA IIROSA believes that the empowerment of marginalized groups is one of the important roles of humanitarian organizations T ogether W e S tand