Structures and Organisation of Third World Forum
• Third World Forum has been purposedly created ‘small’, that is avoiding systematically the trap of heavy administrative infrastructures, which are common to too many ‘NGOs’ proliferating during the last two decades.
In that spirit what has been established as ‘HQ’ for the organisation of Third World Forum, i.e. our Dakar office, is only a small ‘liaison office’.• Third World Forum’s activities rely on two sets of supporters:
1. The members of its own network of individuals, competent and respected in the communities of researchers, thinkers and policy makers.
2. The associate partners, which are research centers and think tanks as well as eventually social organisations and movements interested by the relevancy for their action of the issues raised in our programmes.
That network of partners, who are also in many cases associates in the World Forum for Alternatives and in the World Social Forum (and their national and regional replicas), would not function if not their positive assessment of the benefits that they draw from their inclusion in Third World Forum’s activities.
• These light structures and complex patterns of interventions explain how such vast programmes as those of Third World Forum might be operated with a modest direct budget.
In fact Third World Forum acts as a catalyst.
This function is of utmost importance. It is needed in order to reduce the deficiencies resulting from the extreme fragmentation which characterises the panorama of researches conducted in the areas of Third World Forum’s activities. It is perhaps because Third World Forum has been somehow successful in performing that function that it has become one of the corner stones of the global civil society as represented in the World Social Forum.
Source This text was taken from the website of The Third World Forum (TWF) - Le Forum du Tiers Monde (FTM); at: http://www.forumtiersmonde.net/fren/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=74&Itemid=78.
See also Samir Amin’s website with additional texts at: http://www.forumtier smonde.net/fren/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&id=13&Ite mid= 114. This website also offers a regularly updated list of Samir Amin’s books and articles. Selected texts are for free download.