Much ado to little effect

Considering the fuss there was made about the activities of NGOs and INGOs a year ago it is something of a surprise to find that there are still thousands unchecked in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P). Registered they may be — 4,253 of them recorded in the social welfare department — but there is no record of their funding or the disbursals they make. More startling still is that K-P has no mechanism to monitor the activities of such organisations. Given that at the height of NGO hysteria there was a welter of chatter about where their money came from, were they a cover for foreign intelligence agencies or terrorist groups or just a conduit for dodgy money that went into nameless pockets, it may reasonably have been expected that such monitoring mechanisms were constructed post-haste. Seemingly not so at least in K-P, and it would be interesting to know how other provinces conduct — or not — NGO monitoring.



Pakistan is home and host to tens of thousands of NGOs and INGOs ranging from the tiny local groups to branches of global conglomerates. Many of them do invaluable work, plugging the many gaps there are in the fabric of social welfare and working in partnership with federal and provincial bodies, often to very good effect. Perhaps inevitably there are bad apples as well as good in the barrel, and the government is right to seek to root them out and shut them down, close off their funding and prevent the good apples from being tainted.

As perhaps has been discovered in K-P such a move requires its own infrastructure of legislation, a workforce and the money to run what is going to be a potentially expensive operation. Registration is the easy part, a box-ticking exercise. Identifying a suspect organisation, tracking its funding and expenditure and then acting within the parameters of dedicated legislation is rather more complex. In K-P, officials have admitted that the inflow is in the billions of rupees and they have no clue where that money went or what it is doing. We wonder if those same officials would rather not know what is going on under their noses.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 12^th, 2016.

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