Hussain Dada retweetledi
🚨🚨A worth to read piece how Pakistani NGOs, self proclaimed civil society organisations, rights bodies become a million dollar industry, milking donars but on ground they are good for nothing except with diplomats they can speak English in British or American accents and write proposals in fluent English and part of elite which pretends they are leftist/liberals appearing in panel discussions of different so called intellectual/literary festivals funded by the west: 👇
“In 25 years of working in the development sector and managing millions of dollars in civil society funding, I never once saw a donor fund an organisation such as this. That gap between what we funded and what actually existed tells you almost everything about what has gone wrong with international aid’s relationship with civil society. With USAID now dismantled and the entire model of western development assistance under scrutiny, this question has never been more urgent.
We created a parallel universe of professional NGOs – accountable to their donors in Washington or London, but to no one on the ground.
Pakistan was born with a relatively weak civil society, dominated by a powerful military and an efficient civil bureaucracy – both legacies of a colonial past. Colonies do not run on organised populations. Yet societies always find ways to organise themselves. Market associations, religious welfare networks, professional guilds, neighbourhood councils – these exist everywhere in Pakistan, self-financed and genuinely representative of those they serve.
Somehow, donors never found them. Or rather, they looked right past them. What donors funded instead, quite generously, were those groups established specifically to attract their money. Tight deadlines, pressure to disburse quickly and proposal-driven procurement created an entire ecosystem of professional NGOs that had more in common with contractors than with civil society. They had no deep commitment to any specific cause and were accountable not to their members but to their funders. An organisation working on women’s empowerment one year would pivot to disaster response the next – not because of expertise or passion, but because that was where the money was. Genuine civil society rarely appeared on donors’ radar, because it lacked the one thing donors valued: the ability to write a proposal in fluent English.
The accountability gap made this worse. In my experience, donors scrutinise government expenditures forensically – every receipt, every procurement, every budget line. With NGOs, they were consistently more lenient, despite abundant evidence that the problems they feared in government – corruption, misuse of funds, political capture – existed equally in the NGO sector. This leniency was partly ideological: civil society was seen as inherently more virtuous than the state. It was also practical: holding NGOs to the same standard would have disrupted the disbursement machinery everyone depended on.
There is another dimension that rarely gets discussed. When senior officials from Washington or London visited Pakistan, meetings with “civil society representatives” were arranged by embassy and USAID staff – including, for many years, myself. We always invited the same articulate, English-speaking, internationally networked NGOs whose staff knew how to perform civil society for a foreign audience.”
theguardian.com/global-develop…
English
