Daily Times

Some weeks ago, the government imposed certain restrictions on an international non-governmental organisation (INGO) called Save the Children on the basis of an intelligence report on campaigns against key security interests in the country, ostensibly at the behest of foreign powers hostile to Pakistan’s progress. Suspending its first order, in which it sealed the offices and operations of the INGO in Islamabad, the Interior Ministry let the international NGO continue its work in the country because of pressure from the US. Human Rights Watch will have you believe that it is only authoritarian governments like China, Russia and, by inference, India who have clamped down on the activities of INGOs like Green Peace. But in several thriving and mature democracies, such as Canada and New Zealand, NGOs have lost their charitable status at different points because the governments of those countries deemed their activities to be political in nature and not charitable.

Save the Children, one of the UK’s oldest INGOs, raised almost £ 325 million last year and was alleged to have repeatedly quashed press releases in 2013 that criticised the increase in British gas prices to avoid damaging its corporate partnership with the company, which was worth £ 1.5 million for over 10 years. The charity was also accused of dropping a potential campaign on the effects of fuel poverty on children, while it was under consideration for funding from Électricité de France (EDF), an integrated energy company in the United Kingdom. Save the Children has also been accused of being involved with the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Dr Shakeel Afridi in tracking down the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.

The current situation in Pakistan highlights many problems with modern NGOs. Although a large number of non-governmental organisations have been set up to combat the problems in Pakistan, some are said to be cashing in on the country’s misfortune. While millions of non-profit organisations provide vital services to people around the world, others are created for not so charitable purposes. NGOs are legally obliged to maximise the return on their donations and cannot impose ethical screening on their investments without putting their ability to meet the goals of millions of dollars in annual running costs at risk. Although NGOs claim to be independent, they can still be financed by governments. For example, both the US and the EU announced during the International Conference on Financing for Development that they had made unilateral decisions to gradually increase their development aid, promising to donate an additional $ 12 billion within a few years. In the cases when an NGO is funded either totally or partially by governments, the NGO maintains its non-governmental status by simply excluding government representatives from membership and influence within the organisation.

Although there are some organisations and individuals who really work to help others, there are also those that pursue hidden agendas. In her article on “The Growing Market for NGO Influence”, Lynn Ilon from Florida International University stated: “NGOs are often required to act as policy agents of donor organizations. Whereas local communities may have identified specific needs, these needs do not always coincide with the goals of the donor. For example, a local community may need better local health facilities while the donor may be motivated by a desire to show immediate health results, such as HIV testing, in order to justify their spending and legitimize further funding. Immediate results may conflict with long-term institution building and the NGO is left to negotiate between the two. Known as the “principal-agent” problem in Economics discipline, the result is that recipient needs are mitigated by the actions of the agent (NGO) in order to maintain a relationship with the donor.”

But it is inconceivable that NGOs can achieve their objectives in isolation from national and international political processes and their constituent elements. Different NGOs will play different roles in these processes, and will find their own answers to the questions posed, but all will need to interact with wider forces in one way or another. This reasoning is not likely to be echoed in other jurisdictions, which take a stricter view of what activities a charitable organisation may or may not engage in. There is perfectly legitimate ground to debate where the trade-off between individual liberty and national security, including economic security, should be. But to deny that such a trade-off exists is intellectually dishonest.

The real question is whether Pakistan has the right to be concerned about the potentially damaging effects that foreign-funded NGOs have on Pakistan’s development prospects. The answer is most certainly yes. Governments are accountable to the people who elected them, but who exactly are NGOs like Save the Children accountable to? Being so heavily reliant on foreign funding, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that an NGO will do the bidding of its foreign parent or donor and, therefore, pursue an agenda that might not make sense from the Pakistani point of view.

While I would not go so far as to suggest that NGOs be barred from working in Pakistan, I do think it is crucial that any funds they receive are carefully scrutinised and that their activities are also put under the microscope to determine that their funds are legitimate according to Pakistan’s Foreign Contribution Regulations Act and are actually used as intended. It is high time that we stop giving large, well-funded and powerful NGOs a free pass and subject their agendas and funding to the same scrutiny as we would do with any other interest group, such as an industry lobby. The activists’ implicit assumption that NGOs always occupy the moral high ground, while businesses and governments are the bad guys needs to be directly and firmly challenged.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com