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This dissertation engages questions about the intersection of the global agenda to help poor countries progress with those countries' own efforts to improve their citizens' wellbeing. Specifically, I integrate statistical modeling techniques with fieldwork and original data on non-governmental organizational populations to analyze why sub-Saharan African countries over the past 30 years have differentially accepted the strategies of donor organizations to try to curb rapid population growth. Across this time period, two thirds of African countries have adopted population policies and most countries have seen the number of reproductive health non-governmental organizations NGOs operating within their borders grow rapidly. But not all countries adopted population policies, some adopted them sooner than others, and not all countries have embraced NGOs. By determining the causes of variation across countries in the timing of population policy adoption and the creation of reproductive health NGOs, I begin to answer the larger question about the causes of African countries' differential absorption of the global efforts to "develop" Africa. In the first part of the analysis, I show that the mechanisms that influenced population policy adoption differed before and after 1994. Prior to 1994, the countries that adopted population policies were more difficult to govern and so adopted population policies to bolster their regimes by managing their populations and appearing more like states. After 1994, however, policies diffused to a remaining set of better-governed countries. Across time, the level of World Bank intervention predicts policy adoption. I extend these findings with fieldwork from Nigeria, one of the first policy-adopters, and show that Nigeria's policy was part of a nation-building process but also due to a charismatic minister of health. In the final part of the dissertation, focused on Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania, I show that trends in international aid as well as the country's level of autocracy drive the rise and fall in reproductive health NGOs numbers. The importance of foreign aid to organizational populations shows that donor initiatives in this area have been successful, but the emphasis on service-provider NGOs suggests that these initiatives will not necessarily foster civil societies capable of inducing democracy.
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