The story of Pakistan’s $55 billion foreign debt is a story of endless consultancy scams.
KARACHI: The story of Pakistan’s $55 billion foreign debt is a story of endless consultancy scams. While consultants and lending institutions continue to get richer, Pakistan becomes increasingly poor in its performance on all counts. The more popular fund-attracting labels like ‘access to justice’, ‘status of women’, environment, ‘curriculum development’, ‘capacity building’ and ‘poverty alleviation’ have consumed hundreds of seminars but brought negligible benefits.
Here is an example of a rip-off that appeared in newspapers earlier this month. Anyone who knows something about contemporary development phraseology and can Google, copy, paste, print, bind and present will have a good chance of joining this profitable racket.
The advertisement read: “requires the services of independent consultant/consultancy firm to assess the impact of building and constructing improvement programme (BACIP) on women and children, environment, domestic health, poverty alleviation with assessment of tangible economic benefits of the products and development of pro-poor approaches, entrepreneurs and evaluate seismic risk target population and existing BACIP seismic resistance technologies.”
Furthermore, it said: “The project is funded by World Bank and Japan Social Development Fund, and the project duration is 4 weeks.”
Need I say more?
Naeem Sadiq
Published in The Express Tribune, July 20th, 2011.
