The developing world, including Uganda, has experienced an explosive growth in the number and types of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in recent decades. These “third sector” organizations have become important in filling the service delivery gaps especially in health and education.
Using the case of the NGOs in Gulu District, this study proposed to examine the effect of self-regulation strategy on the performance of NGOs in Uganda. Applying a descriptive research approach, the study sought to establish the relationship between, on the one side, Forms self-regulation mechanism, NGO accountability, transparency policies, and flexibility of NGO structures as independent variables, the NGO regulatory policy of central and local government as intervening variable and NGO performance as a dependent variable, on the other side. The methodology of used in the study was questionnaire and document review methods, Likert scale was used to ease coding and analysis, stratified random sampling was used to form the final study population of (60) NGOs, purposive sampling technique was also used to select key informants respondents (8) from both central and local government officials. The found out that all NGOs in the sample belong to at least one type of self regulation mechanism, the study found that there was a significant positive relationship (with a coefficient of 0.483 significant at 0.01) between adopting accountability standards as a self regulation strategy and the performance of the NGO. The study showed that there was a positive relationship between practicing transparency policies and the performance; it also found that there is a positive relationship (correlation coefficient of .277 at 0.01 level of significance) between flexibility of the NGO structure and performanceand that NGO performance is greatly influenced by the central and local government regulation.
