Home Southern Africa Social Development Agency (SASDA) is a sub-regional, non-profit, non governmental organisation committed to making a valuable contribution in transforming the social landscape across Southern Africa through capacity building, empowerment and sustainability of the NGO sector as lever for sustained social growth.

SASDA operates in a region that has for decades been beset by express violations of human rights, illiteracy and lack of education, poverty and unemployment, inadequate community facilities, hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity, disease and sickness, the scourge of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the distress of children caught in the vicious circle.

In recent years there has been a proliferation of Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs), as alternative to the promotion of grassroots development of marginalized groups within the sub-region but their mandate has not been without daunting challenges and constraints.

There are no actual statistics as to the number of NGOs operating across the sub-region. However, the South African Department of Social Development estimates that there are over 50,000 registered non profit organisations in South Africa alone and a lot more are being created on a daily basis. Of this number, over 65% are burdened with huge challenges and constraints that compromise the quantity and quality of work they carry out.

The two principal causes that have been identified to be at the root of the challenges and constraints facing the NGO sector are:

		Lack of organisational capacity
		Insufficient funding

Meanwhile, the NGO sector, if properly developed has the potential to play a pivotal role in determining how individuals, families, groups and whole communities can respond to their plight and thereby creating the desired levels of social development. It is evident that there is need for a serious impetus to the sector; to provide it with the capacity essential for effective programming and implementation and to enable organisations within the sector to project-manage donor funding diligently.

The need for social transformation across the sub-region transcends ideology and has simply become a matter or urgency and our perspective is that the NGO sector has the potential to lead the populations and communities in that direction.

Our focus therefore, is to capacitate the NGO sector in the understanding and use or social development project management tools and techniques, NGO governance principles and to ensure increase funding and sustainability of the sector to guarantee social growth.