According to a Business Recorder report from Islamabad, appearing in the issue of April 25 while the government has failed to control the mushroom growth of Non-Governmental Organisations, the Ministry of Social Welfare has shelved the draft bill aimed at streamlining their funding from foreign donors and ensuring proper utilisation of resources. It is estimated that there are more than 0.15 million NGOs, operating in health, education, environment and social welfare sectors in the country, on hefty grants from international donors.
However, quoting official sources in the Ministry of Social Welfare, the report said that complaints of massive financial embezzlement, and improper utilisation of donors' funding, have not been adequately addressed. The failure in this regard, has been attributed, among other factors, to too weak a monitoring mechanism, which, in the absence any well-defined criteria to monitor foreign funding of these organisations has exacerbated disarray in their performance, thereby.
Moreover, recalling that some two years ago it was decided to draft a new regulatory law, no headway has been made in the desired direction.
Mention, in this regard, may also be made of detection of serious financial irregularities in health, education, environment and other ministries, allegedly committed in the implementation of different projects being jointly run with NGOs.
For example, a three-year 'adult literacy project' costing Rs 34.5 million, and run jointly by the government and NGOs, had reportedly been found to have failed to yield the desired results. Although the government cancelled the agreements with five NGOs, responsible for substantial economic losses, it failed to recover the amount. The project was launched in April 2002 in rural areas of the federal capital to educate illiterate adults. The participating NGOs were asked to enrol at least 25 students in every centre, for which they recruited teachers on monthly stipend of Rs 1500. But as many as 50 percent of NGOs were found to have presented fake figures of adult literacy, having set up "ghost" literacy centres.
However, the government's monitoring system failed to detect them, thereby resulting in a loss of Rs 34.5 million to the national exchequer. Yet the officials running the project said that they were preparing a new PC-I for the second phase of the project.
Instances of this kind might have been one of the reasons why the government has time and again requested the foreign donors, including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, not to directly provide funds to the NGOs. As our report had it, more than half of the NGOs happen to be headed either by bureaucrats themselves, or by their family members.
As such the bureaucracy has been found to be a major hurdle in legislation of new laws to streamline NGOs and to ensure unfailing vigilance on their performance. There are four laws under which such organisations are registered.
These include the Societies Registration Act, 1860, the Trust Act, 1882, the Voluntary Social Welfare Agencies (R&C) Ordinance, 1961 and the Companies Ordinance, 1984.
As a new law may also require amendments to some of these laws, the normal bureaucratic way of working can easily thwart all progress on it. However, learning the right lessons from the past, it will be in the fitness of things for the government to revamp the whole structure of the NGO system from a bold new thrust without any further loss of time.