KARACHI, Sept 5: About 53 per cent of registered organizations in the nonprofit sector are inactive, closed or untraceable.

This was revealed by a study conducted by the Social Policy and Development Centre (SPDC). The study, titled “Dimensions of the nonprofit sector in Pakistan”, was launched at a function here on Thursday.

The acting managing director of the SPDC, Dr Kaiser Bengali, said that the study was the first of a series of working papers being produced by the SPDC as part of an international research initiative — the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project — spearheaded by the Centre for Civil Society Studies, Johns Hopkins University, US.

He added that the study, which encompassed more than 2,000 nonprofit organizations, was aimed at evaluating the size, structure and scope of this sector.

SPDC senior economist Asif Iqbal informed the audience that the study also determined the relationship that the nonprofit sector had with the international community, local community and businesses. Laying down pertinent definitions, he spoke about various data collection techniques adopted by the SPDC. He conceded that the nonprofit sector could not have a clear-cut definition because it overlapped with the government sector, as well as the corporate sector.

SPDC principal economist Haroon Jamal said the study regarded only those organizations as nonprofit organizations (NPOs) which had an institutional presence and structure. “They are institutionally separate from the state. They do not return profits to (their) members, managers and directors. They are in control of their affairs. They attract some level of voluntary contribution.”

He said 12 districts were selected for the primary survey. They were Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Multan, Sargodha, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Lahore, Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Peshawar and Quetta. In this way, he added, the study covered about 43 million people of the country’s population.

The SPDC principal economist explained that though there were various ordinances that registered nonprofit organizations, effectively, there were three acts that approximately covered 80 to 90 per cent of the registered domain. He added that the acts were the Voluntary Social Welfare Agencies Ordinance 1961, Societies Registration Act 1860 and Companies Ordinance (Section 42) 1984.

Speaking about the conclusions of the study, he said that perhaps the most important pattern of nonprofit activity was the dominance of education. “This sector retains 71 per cent of the total estimated nonprofit employment. Organizations that provide primary education alone have a share of 25 per cent of (the) total employment in the nonprofit sector. The share of organizations providing religious education is about 17 per cent, while the organizations providing secondary and higher education employ nearly 28 per cent (of the) total labour force employed by the nonprofit sector.”

He added that the second largest sector in terms of paid employment was health, which provided about 11 per cent of nonprofit sector employment. “The domination of education and health activities is evident from the data. Most of their revenues come from fees and user charges. The fee component alone has a share of 34 per cent in the total nonprofit sector cash revenue.”

A participant asked the SPDC members why they had not covered various church organizations in the country when their study covered Madaris. Mr Jamal said church organizations were not included in the study because it did not cover religious worship. He added that the study also omitted those organizations whose sole objective was to organize one or two functions a year, such as Jashn-i-Eid Miladun Nabi etc.”

Another participant of the seminar observed that bracketing of large non-governmental organizations with very small NGOs created the impression that small NGOs were doing well, which was certainly not the case.