The development of institutionalized voluntary sector or the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa is a complementary response to the shortfall in public sector provision. But that development was made possible because of the existence of communitarian principles of advocacy, obligation and responsibility, already practised in the extended family before the arrival of the European Christian missions. The success of foreign NGGs is due to the management principles of openness, accountability and non-distributiveness demonstrated in their operations. It is proposed that African NGOs should apply their communitarian principles to these management principles so as to become more responsive to the needs of their people. In this way African NGGs will be able to tap into their local resource base to fund more good causes as well as contributing towards an inclusive and sustainable bottom-up democratic welfare system.
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