Our Poverty and NGOs.
Tired of persistent poverty and starvation, a desperate woman living near Faisalabad finally decided to get rid of the daily physical and psychological degradation by poisoning herself and three children to death on December 24, 1998. It is indeed a matter of grave concern for us. The Frontier Post, however, ran an editorial on Dec. 26, 1998, which puts all the blame on three parties: the government, NGOs and human rights groups. As far the NGOs are concerned the editorial has issued a blanket indictment, covering all the NGOs alike. It is important for all of us to be informed by a good understanding of the NGOs working to alleviate poverty in Pakistan. There is a lack of awareness in the media regarding the correct role of NGOs - particularly Rural Support Programmes.
We often take for granted that we know what poverty is and which organisations are combating it. Images of many NGOs come to mind when this term is so generalized and combined with sweeping statements like: "NGOs have made a business of making money in the name of public service." The first and foremost fact to be clarified in this regard is that not all NGOs are working for poverty alleviation and claiming "selfless service to humanity." The only NGOs working to this end are Rural Support Programmes (RSPs) or the UNDP Poverty Alleviation Programme. The core philosophy of these organisations is that they have realised that if development and poverty alleviation has indeed been a failure, it is because reaching the poor and securing for them wider opportunities has not been the focus of development work.
Unlike the other NGOs, the idea behind RSPs is that the entire system must move away from seeing poverty alleviation as a development outcome, and instead make it the principal goal of all development activities. This requires a major shift in thinking among all the players in the development process - from donor institutions, to national governments, right to the grassroots. These are RSPs and not the other NGOs, which have acknowledged the paramount imperative of liberating the poor from the myriad of formal and informal impediments to self-development.
When we are talking about the issue of poverty and particularly when tragic death of four human beings is associated with it, and then we make a statement that the "air was filled with the shrill of boasts about...selfless service to humanity." And go on to say that "NGOs have made a business of making money," the only organisations working for poverty alleviation that come to mind are RSPs. Contrary to the stated generalisations, RSPs -- to borrow from the UNDP Senior Advisor, Shoaib Sultan Khan -- have "created islands of hope in the vast sea of despair."
Unlike the advocacy , human rights, or other NGOs working for education, environment etc., RSPs are unique kind of support programmes which if understood in detail would not give rise to the complaints as depicted in Dec. 26, editorial of the Frontier Post. Poverty, of course, is a baffling problem in Pakistan and the root causes go deeper to the grotesque social, economic and political inequalities. But these are the problems that need a direct confrontational approach, which is the direct responsibility of the advocacy groups and organisations. The RSPs on the other hand are working to create participatory village level institutional framework for effective implementation of the programmes for the poor.
The latest Human Development report shows that Pakistan has done better in reducing income poverty than human poverty. In 1996, for instance, over 45% of its people suffered human poverty. The Human development indes uses indicators of more basic dimensions of deprivations like lack of education, lack of access to basic services, and low life expectancy. Pakistan has made little progress in human development over the years as indicated by three different indices(HPI, HDI, and GEI - Gender related index), which have not improved much from between 1973 till now. Therefore, contrary to the specialised agencies for reaching the poor, RSPs create, promote and support effective and disciplined community organisations to manage rural development and work toward self-reliance and poverty alleviation.
Neither galactic fantasies nor revolutionary technological changes justify us in proceeding on any other basis. We have to manage within the resources our country offers. According to Akhtar Hammed Khan, we have to relate our conceptual packages to the ground reality, not to the "ivory tower" conditions. Political regimes and social rules have often served to suppress human rights and political freedom but addressing such problems is already on the agenda of advocacy NGOs. The basic strategy that is being adopted at the grassroots by RSPs throughout the South Asian region is Social Mobilisation as a mean to realize the extent of poverty in the communities and plan for its reduction through the collective efforts of the respective community.
The strategy promotes at once mobilisation of the group's own resources and the power to handle its resources in the most effective manner the group deems fit. Group action also stimulates in this decision-making context, new thought processes trigger off questions and enquiries among the members of the group about what they can and should do to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty whichever way it is manifested in the community and in their own lives.
Apart from providing the necessary leadership and technical skills, the RSPs evolve responsible credit behaviour through the encouragement of regular saving and the provision of some financial support to the group to take up on its own and through the rest of the community or other similar groups, work programmes that are essential to the group. The essence of this approach is much greater than the meager financial support, which is that it is the people who should identify what their needs are, based on their own understanding and perception, decide the manner of implementing their ideas and execute those ideas through their own initiatives. This binds them together further as a group. This is an antidote to the normal top-down approach.
The seeds of this strategy are now being sown in the minds of the participating groups. The results from AKRSP, NRSP and SRSC have been quite encouraging in terms of the groups formed for poverty alleviation and sustainable development. They have realised their limitless potential in innumerable other areas. That this approach is bound to succeed is not in question. This is because this approach has been tested out successfully at least over a couple of decades in some of the SAARC counties. AKRSP in Pakistan is one of the successful programme. The Grameen and BRAC of Bangladesh have demonstrated the validity of this approach conclusively. So have SEWA and WCP of India. So has the SFDP of Nepal. It should also be acknowledged that that some of the programmes designed and implemented by the governments of the member-countries using large national resources of their own like DWCRA (Development of Women and Children in Rural Aras) for more than a decade now in India and Janasaviya in Seri Lanka had incorporated these strategies of group action.
It should be understood that it is not the responsibility of RSP's to provide food security to the citizen. This role squarely belongs to the government. RSPs are there to supplement government efforts and to go where government cannot reach - e.g. remote rural areas. Of necessity, the RSP process and methodology is time consuming as it involves lengthy participatory procedures, which ascertain the wishes of the people before moving ahead with development.
A country which boasts to be the only state based on Islam should recall the glorious era of Hazarat Umer, for Instance, and do something to replicate those traditions. No citizen of an Islamic state should die of hunger if everyone paid Zakat and usher it is distributed justly. People are dying because we are not fulfilling our social and moral obligations as Muslims. We do not enquire about our neighbours, about the poor and the needy - we are downright selfish.
What we need now is to understand the concept of RSP's, their approach and help these ideas to take root in a larger area. Such programmes are in the process of implementation, expansion and consolidation in the project areas throughout the country. Admittedly, the project areas are small and the resources involved are also very small and these are being rapidly expanded to meaningfully face the staggering magnitude of poverty in Pakistan. Our intellectuals need to broad base and reinforce them, by recognising and emphasising the strengths and merits of RSP efforts. Keeping the present political and economic chaos in mind, if we kept on criticising NGOs in general, RSP's would suffer along the other "one-man show NGOs."
Similarly, if we reprimand all the NGOs for not being successful in poverty alleviation without understanding the RSPs philosophy, we would soon find many more women and children dying not of self-poisoning but real starvation, because such transmission of misconceptions would be helping the forces of poverty to prevail. Our flawed generalisations would hinder RSP's strategy to combat the Himalayan poverty of Pakistan with genuine humility. We have to support, strengthen and acknowledge the efforts of those who are really working for poverty reduction before criticising everyone as community of non-government organisations is an area where people of different mentality and organisations of different objectives are working.
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