By Hans Zomer
One World Europe
May 1998
In April 1998, Mian Nawaz Sharif was the first Pakistani Prime Minister to meet with the President of the European Commission. The occasion for the visit was the signing of a new agreement between the EU and Pakistan. Under the headings of "human resource development", "poverty alleviation", the "improvement of the situation of women and children" and "the environment", the EU is supporting large and small projects in Pakistan.Examples include the Rural Electrification programme and the Flood Protection and Rehabilitation projects. But EU assistance also benefits the social sector: support for educational activities of the Aga Khan Foundation, a project with the ILO to combat child labour, a large Environmental Rehabilitation project and a major project to strengthen capacity in the NGO sector. The latter project was not without problems, however.
Pakistan is a country which has seen many spells of military rule and which does not have a very long tradition of civil society movements and non-governmental organisations. However, under the influence of "people- centred development models" and - more importantly - due to the massive financial support from donors, the country has seen a boom of NGO activitiy in recent years. While this rapid evolution is encouraging, concern has arisen about the quality of NGO work. Most organizations consist of well-meaning individuals, but they often lack managerial and technical skills to design, implement and monitor programmes. Yet, the easy availability of funds for NGOs in Pakistan has meant that many inefficient organizations are continuing to exist.
The EU-funded Rural Social Development Programme (RSDP) aimed to strengthen the development NGOs and Community Based Organizations in Pakistan. Initially designed in 1993, the programme focused on "institutional development of Support Organizations and, through them, to provide support to community-based organizations and middle level NGOs..." However, both the delays in negotiating the Cooperation Agreement and changes in the Commission's priorities meant that the programme still had not kicked off when the agreement was finally signed in 1998.
These delays brought with them slight changes in the emphasis of the programme. Where in earlier drafts the emphasis was on the improvement of rural and semi-urban NGO services in the fields of basic health, basic education and family planning, later on the programme put more stress on the need to invest in the capacity of the "Support Organizations" themselves. The original aim of improving social services was replaced by the objective of supporting seven large NGOs, in the hope that that would benefit the NGO sector as a whole.
Furthermore, there were particular problems with some of the organizations that were to channel the EU funds to the rural NGOs and CBOs. One organization, which focuses on family planning issues, was completely paralysed by the struggle in its Board between people who represented the old government and those who were put in the Board by the Nawaz Sharif government. Necessary new staff could not be hired and, in the end, the Director was fired as he was seen to be too political (i.e. too much in line with the previous government).
As such, the RSDP is an example of bad planning on the part of the EU. But it also illustrates how difficult it is to support civil society activities in countries with a politicised and centralised government. And it shows that vast amounts of money (20 million ECU in this case) are being paid to the NGO sector, eventhough there often is little proof of the sector's impact. Donor agencies usually are convinced that it is a good thing to support development NGOs, as those agencies can reach people and places that governments cannot and their bottom-up approach helps ordinary people to express their needs and use their own abilities.
However, many governments in developing countries feel that, with the vast amounts of aid money flowing through NGOs, these organizations are becoming a better-paid and better-equipped competitor to what would normally be government responsibilities. They are therefore reluctant to approve of aid packages that invest heavily in the NGO sector and ignore the needs of the governmental structures. Knowing they are the favourites of the international aid community, NGOs - rather than addressing these legitimate fears - usually respond by accusing the government of greediness and corruption.
However, it is not immediately obvious that NGOs do really reach the poor, and do so in a cost-effective and innovative way. Traditionally, NGOs are good at making big claims, but less good at critically evaluating their achievements. Many NGOs speak of evaluation, when all they do is monitor what they do. Monitoring is measuring activity; Evaluation is measuring impact.
NGOs tend to emphasise quantifiable outcomes of their projects, and ignore the more difficult issues relating to the development process. Most evaluations mention numbers of people trained, amounts of equipment supplied or number and dates of workshops held. But very few NGO evaluations answer questions such as: what was the quality of local participation? Has the target group benefitted from the project? Have the poorest groups increased their self-reliance and capacity to deal with the world around them?
I would be the first to say that it is very difficult to clearly evaluate the impact of NGO work. NGOs work in the social development sector, which is a lot more complicated than, say, the construction of tube wells or bridges. You can measure the impact of a newly constructed dam, but how do you measure the attainment of an objective like "empowerment of the rural poor" or the "improvement of the situation of women and children"?
This type of question has led many donors to stop insisting on impact evaluations, resulting in ill-thought out programmes such as the RSDP, which invests money in a few large organizations in the hope that it will trickle down to the poor people of Pakistan. But rather than giving up on measuring impact, donors could stress the need for control and accountability in the NGO sector. They could assist NGOs (local as well as international) in finding ways to assess achievement, without creating a lot of paperwork and unnecessary bureaucracy. The aim is not to impose certain book-keeping tricks on NGOs, but to find ways of ensuring that aid money is wisely used.
European NGOs have in recent years become aware of the need to enhance their accountability. The NGDO-EU Liaison Committee last year published a series of discussion papers on the relations between European NGOs and their donors. While stressing the variety of "the NGDO approach", the NGOs based in the European Union did agree on a number of basic values and approaches for good NGO work. The challenge now is to translate these statements into clear instructions for their field staff. And maybe also into guidelines for the donors? It seems the EU could certainly do with some assistance as well...
