Exploring the role of NGOs in influencing enterprise policy: Insights from Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

The ineffectiveness of enterprise policy in some southern Africa’s rural areas has led to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attempting to increase their political influence by engaging in the enterprise policy process. This paper examines the case of one NGO from one of the poorest southern African countries – Zimbabwe – in order to bring insights to its role as policy influencer in the regional approaches of enterprise policy-making. The paper argues that an understanding of such role requires the appreciation of how people and organisations are embedded to their contexts. The evidence suggests that in the case study the NGO’s role is only modest.

KEYWORDS:

• NGOs
• enterprise policy process
• embeddedness
• southern Africa
• entrepreneurship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Broadly, Southern Africa includes the countries of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Some institutions, however, can take a wider classification.

2 An emergency situation was declared on 14 November 2017, when the army took over the city of Harare with the objective of removing the president. Such goal was peacefully achieved one week later, on 21 November. On 30 July 2018 Zimbabwe celebrated democratic elections with the involvement of international observers. The ZANU-PF political party won that elections and remains in power so far.

3 Throughout the time of the empirical research, there were other proposals raised by NGO-EP, but they never made any influence on the enterprise policy process, so they are ignored in this paper.