Sustaining NGO’s Through Social Entreprenuership

The NGO sector has been a global revolution that is reacting rapidly to the social,political,environmental and economic needs of poor and impoverished countries.Economic recession,global turmoil,poverty and disease,natural disasters are some of the world’s developments that have made NGO’s activities possible.More so,policymakers around the world have found it extremely difficult to find permanent solutions to these problems.Consequently,NGOs were a solution to the problems,as they led local people to take steps that could improve their life in the face of complicated difficulties.Non-Governmental Organizations(NGOs)are any non-profit,voluntary citizens’ association that is locally,nationally or globally coordinated and task-oriented and guided by people of mutual interest.They offer humanitarian services geared towards tackling social problems and receive their major source of funding from international donors.In Ghana today,they constitute one of the fastest initiatives for contributing to society.Ghana has long been considered a country of ’donor darling’ for bilateral and multilateral donors.After seven consecutive peaceful elections,vibrant space for CSOs and NGOs,relatively stable governance structures and accountable systems,over the past 20 years,Ghana has obtained significant public aid support since it returned to civilian rule.Research has shown,for example that,about 70 per cent of NGO funding in Ghana comes from international donors and bilateral and multilateral partners in Ghana.In recent times,there is growing evidence proving the continuous decline in donor support which poses sustainability challenges to local NGOs in lower-middle-income countries including Ghana.To tackle this problem,Local NGOs need to device ways to raise funds to support their operation.Through Social entrepreneurship local NGOs can generate funds to support their organizations and remain sustainable.However,what will influence these local NGOS to develop social entrepreneurship intention remains underexplored.The study adopted two theories which is the institutional theory and the theory of planned behavior to draw empirical data to examine how institutional factors(pressures)can influence social entrepreneurship intention amongst local NGOs in Ghana.The study tested the relationship between the three institutional pressures(coercive,mimetic and normative)to social entreprenuership intention mediated by NGO management attitude and moderated by social entreprenuership training.The questionnaire survey method was used to collect data from local non-governmental organization within the Northern and Upper West regions of Ghana.The data was collected from 333 managers of local non-governmental organization operating in the areas of education,sanitation,health,poverty reduction and HIV.The findings of the relationship between coercive institutional pressure and social entreprenuership intention supported our hypothesis that coercive pressures have a positive influence social entreprenuership intention whereas the findings of mimetic and normative pressures did not support the hypothesis.Additionally,the result of the relationship between the three institutional pressures and attitude all supported the hypothesis which stated that all three institutional pressures positively influence NGO management attitude towards social entreprenuership intention.The findings of the moderating effect of social entreprenuership training shows that both low and high levels of training will increase social entreprenuership intentions but the effect is higher with higher levels of training and increases marginally with low levels of training.Policy implications and recommendations are suggested based on the findings of this study.