Private voluntary organizations and the promotion of small-scale enterprise

workshop on the subject. The literature shows that SSE's can be successfully promoted through credit, technical assistance, and short-term training. However, it is small- or medium-sized manufacturing firms rather than microenterprises and trading businesses that seem to generate new employment and establish links to other economic sectors. For this reason, critics question the cost-effectiveness of SSE projects by PVO's, which focus increasingly on generating empowerment and equity among the poor. Such questions indicate the need for a systems approach to SSE development, i.e., one that embraces all relevant factors and institutions. Several AID-sponsored SSE projects conducted by PVO's are enlightening in this regard. Two evaluations of entrepreneurship training programs of Opportunities Industrialization Centers International (OICI) indicate the value of a comprehensive institution-building effort. OICI's extensive efforts in establishing public and private sector advisory and policymaking bodies ensure the availability of expert advice and facilitate working relationships with the government, thus increasing the policy voice of local OIC's. Other organizations, such as the Sarvodaya Shramadana in Sri Lanka, the Northeast Union of Assistance to Small Business (UNO) project in Brazil, the Partnership for Productivity project in Burkina Faso, and Manila Community Services, Inc. in the Philippines, are even more insistent on the importance of the social and political and not merely the economic concerns of SSE projects, both as outcomes to be pursued and as causes of project success. Rather than adopting a conventional, narrowly conceived cost-benefit approach, these organizations suit a project to the local situation in order to effect sustainable change benefiting the largest possible public. Such systems projects can be small and simple. The key factor is the entrepreneurial spirit that successful PVO's increasingly seem to be displaying in their SSE projects. A 5-page bibliography (1965-83) is appended.