No description available.

Numerous NGOs were set up by Ethiopian community in Israel to advance the community's integration and empowemient, with particular emphasis on the education system. This study was designed to try and answer the question why, for all the efforts of these NGOs, they had not created more significant social change?

Despite the increasing role and prominence of NGOs in the health and social development sectors of many countries, their effectiveness and sustainability, especially in the developing world, has not been clearly understood. The implementation of various social, political, economic and market-based health reforms, particularly from the 1980s onwards, has been cited as the major factor influencing their effectiveness. This thesis proposes that organisational theory provides a useful framework and a set of insights for understanding the behaviour of health care organisations.

No description available.

While there has been research on the reasons for non-adoption of Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) technologies from the perspective of the farmer, little cognisance has been taken of the role played by faith based institutions in promoting Soil and Water Conservation. For Catholic development agencies, they have an advantage of reaching out to the communities through the Catholic Church structures that are spread around the globe. In addition, Catholic development agencies share the same moral principles and their source of motivation to be involved in development activities come from the Catholic Social Teaching (CTS) which aims at promoting justice and empowering communities to come out of poverty. This research focussed on the institutional influences that affected the adoption of SWC technologies in a project that was implemented , by Catholic Development Commission in Malawi (CADECOM), a development and relief agency of the Episcopal Conference of Malawi (ECM).

No description available.

This dissertation aims to develop and validate a conceptual framework about the enablers and constraints for the creation and sharing of knowledge assets. Knowledge assets are understood as a subset of dispositions to act that is embedded in individuals, groups or artefacts and that allows us to economise the consumption of resources for a given amount of effort (Boisot 1998). The creation of knowledge assets within organisations is seen as a knower-dependent, social and non-linear process of learning that builds on information. Enablers and constraints can be found at any part of this learning process and differ from one information environment to another. The theoretical framework integrates Boisot's Social Learning Cycle (SLC) with an Information Ecology model in order to identify the potential enablers and constraints within specific information environments. The empirical setting chosen for this research is a group of leading international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs) and their domestic NGO partners, pursuing a policy advocacy strategy in the context of a high-level international donors conference. Policy advocacy refers to a set of activities directed towards influencing decision makers in a way that contributes to benefiting disadvantaged populations. Advocate INGOs and their domestic NGO partners (advocacy communities) gain influence by becoming alternate sources of information to decision makers (Keck and Sikkink 1998); their ability to create and share knowledge assets is then critical. The research is based on an in-depth case study and qualitative analysis techniques (Eisenhardt 1989; Yin 1989; Marshall and Rossman 1995), focusing on two levels: Intra-organisational and inter-organisational. The collection of data covers a one-year period (February 2003 to February 2004). The focus on a complex information environment, represented here by transnational advocacy communities, proves valuable in expanding existing theory about the dynamics of the creation and sharing of knowledge assets in and between organisations. The data collected suggests that most constraints are of internal nature and are centred on the value exploiting stage of the SLC. Constraints associated with organisations' cultures, individuals' information processing preferences, and politics are prominent.

Εμάς η έρευνα μας επικεντρώθηκε στις μη κυβερνητικές οργανώσεις στην Ελλάδα που αφορούν τα παιδιά και μάλιστα πιο συγκεκριμένα κακοποιημένα, φτωχά, ορφανά, άρρωστα παιδιά κτλ.. Επίσης παρουσιάζουμε κάποιες οργανώσεις για παιδιά με νοητική υστέρηση ή κάποιου άλλου είδους αναπηρία. Οι μη κυβερνητικές οργανώσεις για το παιδί εντάσσονται στη λογική για την υπεράσπιση, προώθηση και την εξασφάλιση των δικαιωμάτων της. Απώτερος σκοπός τους είναι η προστασία του παιδιού. Η έρευνα μας ως επί των πλείστων στηρίχθηκε σε στοιχεία που αντλήσαμε για τις διάφορες οργανώσεις από το διαδίκτυο. Επίσης συμβουλευτήκαμε κάποια βιβλία και ορισμένα άρθρα. Προσπαθήσαμε να συλλέξουμε πληροφορίες σχετικά με το έτος ίδρυσης της κάθε οργάνωσης, την οργάνωση, τους σκοπούς και τις λειτουργίες καθώς και τους τομείς δράσης της. Στο τέλος της εργασίας θα αναφερθούμε στην κριτική που κάνει το κράτος στις οργανώσεις αυτές. / -