Reaching out to rural NGOs in South Africa

SANGONeT’s latest initiatives build capacity for NGOs in rural South Africa. Photo: nrkbetaThe Southern African NGO Network (SANGONeT) has embarked on repositioning itself and making inroads in rural provinces that have never benefited from SANGONeT programmes and products. Most NGOs in rural areas lack the capacity to engage in and participate on ICT platforms. To address this problem SANGONeT established a Capacity Building Unit that has started to move to all regions to carry out consultation processes and skills audits with local NGOs.
In line with its rural development strategy, SANGONeT partnered with the South African National NGO Coalition (SANGOCO) to host the Nonprofit Organisation (NPO) Summit, which brought together some 1,100 delegates from 529 NGOs around the country for three days. One of the resolutions from the summit was the development of an internship programme for around 100 interns aimed especially at supporting NGOs in rural areas. The interns will focus on ICT in these NGOs, and SANGONeT believes that this will increase the capacity of these organisations to participate in online platforms and other developmental growth.