NGO Profile: SPARC: Developing New NGO Lines

Abstract

SPARC (the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres) is one of the best known NGOs working on housing issues in the Global South—perhaps most especially for its work with women pavement dwellers in Bombay in India. This article, first published in Environment and Urbanization in 1990, describes SPARC’s early work and achievements as well as how the organisation developed. The NGO profile was developed from an interview with Sheela Patel from SPARC by Diana Mitlin (coeditor of Environment and Urbanization) in November 1989, with additional material supplied by SPARC or drawn from SPARC documentation. It also engages with the organisation’s work on drug abuse and on biases against women in government sponsored income generation projects; its emphasis in its work on what it calls ‘process’ rather than projects; the measure of its own effectiveness in the extent to which it can mobilise other people and groups rather than its own growth as an organisation; the alliances it has forged with other groups, especially the National Slum Dwellers Federation of India, Mahila Milan (a federation of women’s collectives) and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights; and its conscious policy to avoid hierarchy in its own organisation.