Local Support Organisations: An Exit Strategy for Rural Development NGOs.

Rural development NGOs are often trapped into indefinite support for the grassroots organisations they help to create. This article explores an exit strategy whereby such NGOs help to establish multi-tier apex organisations of, rather than for, the people, that are able to replace them. This enables them to move on to other communities or to address their resource constraints as donor funding becomes tighter. Drawing on fieldwork, it argues that a gradual withdrawal and building on community social capital are more likely to lead to the success of such a strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]