Creating a national NGO council for strengthening social welfare services in Africa: Some organizational and technical problems experienced in Malawi

Abstract In 1985, Malawi's social welfare organizations formed the Council for Social Welfare Services in an attempt to strengthen the delivery of social welfare services to the underprivileged. This was to be achieved with more formalized, co‐ordinated functioning among organizations and a better system for assessing the technical, financial and training needs of the organizations and the population and for meeting them. This paper examines the feasibility of finding such an organization that works. It focuses on problems such as the heterogeneity of social welfare organizations in terms of origin, objective guidelines and operational cultures, as well as the feasibility of getting the necessary co‐operation to strengthen the council's resource and authority capacity to meet its own objectives. The overall view in this paper is that the council has a long way to go before it achieves the situation for which it stands, if that is at all possible, because of the idiosyncratic nature of social welfare organizations.