Pakistan’s 11,000 NGOs: Spearheading Development or Siphoning off Foreign Aid?

by Richard H. Curtiss

Just as American tax-exempt churches and charities are a politically untouchable drain on the U.S. Treasury, Pakistani non-governmental organizations occasionally are criticized in the country’s outspoken press, but probably no elected Pakistani government would dare to question their value or attempt to restrict them significantly.

Most Pakistanis attribute the astonishing proliferation of NGOs during Pakistan’s first 49 years of independence to their ability to attract foreign aid. The question this raises is whether the foreign grants that sustain the NGOs would go elsewhere if the NGOs did not exist, or whether the NGOs in fact are siphoning off foreign aid that might otherwise go to the Pakistani government.

Since the U.S. government provides virtually no government-to-government aid to Pakistan—for political reasons discussed elsewhere in this issue—this question is moot in the case of American aid to Pakistani NGOs. Nevertheless, the entire topic is aired in Pakistan’s free-wheeling media, as in the following excerpt from an article by Ishtiaq Ahmed entitled “Wooing West at National Expense” in the May 17,1996 issue of The Nation, a Pakistani daily:

“Official estimates put the number of registered NGOs in the country close to 11,000. Most of them have sprung up since the 1980s in the name of social welfare, human, women and children’s rights. The number of unregistered NGOs is unknown. But even most of the registered NGOs are said to be mere paper bodies. The reason apparently is that over 8,000 of them are registered under the Societies Act, which has proved to be an ‘ineffective law.’”

The administration of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is said to have started looking into the status of religious training establishments after the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, which Pakistanis attributed to religious extremists. Many of the religious schools belonging to different Islamic sectarian groups were said to be receiving funds from Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Under current Pakistani laws, NGOs receiving aid from foreign countries must have their books regularly audited. What prevents the bulk of the other NGOs from registering under any of Pakistan’s regulatory laws is the desire to avoid just such auditing which, of course, is expensive.

While it is beyond the purview of the Washington Report to express an opinion on Pakistan’s NGO scene, it is obvious from visits to some of the most active NGOs that many are effective in attacking the country’s major problems in the fields of human rights, women’s rights, economic and social development, family planning, and freedom of expression, and others seem little more than nepotistic ventures or individual ego trips.

Nevertheless, for a foreign journalist, the NGOs are a ready source of free and unfettered opinion and commentary on the country’s daunting social, economic and political problems. They also provide indisputable evidence that Pakistan, unlike many of its fellow Islamic countries, truly is a working democracy, with freedom of assembly and expression which at present is comparable in every way to that of the United States.