NGOS AND COMMUNITY-DEVELOPMENT IN URBAN AREAS - A NIGERIAN CASE-STUDY

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are powerful agents of change and development. This article provides a typology of NGOs and justifies their continued existence and proliferation. NGOs may not have been motivated by purely altruistic reasons. However, the marginalization and increasing poverty of the majority of people in the developing world have motivated the rethinking of NGOs in the development process. Emphasis is now on various poverty-reduction strategies using targeted aids, self-help, education and training in the poverty clusters of urban areas. The article then uses the Catholic community project in Ajegunle, a hitherto depressing suburb of Lagos, as a case study to validate the assertions in the paper.