In a recent interview with the News, Veteran Marxist leader and an eminent lawyer Abid Hasan Manto shared his grim beliefs about the non-governmental organisation (NGOs) sector. As he puts it, “We are witnessing a phenomenon where we don’t see new entrants in the domain of politics, NGOs and their international patrons have hired political activists and de-politicised them.”

As someone affiliated with the development sector, I feel there is a kernel of truth in Manto’s words. Tragedy is that the NGO sector is actually built on the vision for social change and brings in its fold individuals who have the greatest commitment to it. Yet the paper pushing, number crunching, glossy report publishing and policy dialoguing vortex that they get sucked into pretty much strips if not sterilises them of any passion they initially had.

Soon enough ideals such as ‘participatory democracy’, ‘empowerment’, ‘gender equality’, become essential jargon you must stud every development proposal with in order to ensure donor funding. Genuine engagement with the ‘program beneficiaries’ just means you make a road trip to their remote community, harass them with four hours of intrusive questions, only to disappear back to your cushy offices, satisfied that your program now fulfills the ‘community participation’ requirement that every donor agency harps on about.

And with the closing of every donor funded program, you find yourself arranging an exorbitantly expensive seminar, hoping that the pictures of the happy shiny faces of poor children on your slides and the heartwarming success stories that accompany these will make up for the lack of substantial change in the development indicators on the ground.

Yet, this is inevitably the fate of almost anyone who enters this sector and that is not a judgment of them, it is a judgment of our development paradigm. Over three decades, thousands of development agencies and billions of development assistance dollars later, if there is one reality that is becoming painfully impossible to ignore, it is that top-down development does not work.

The current discourse on development is focused on achieving more of the same, except with better organisation, more money and accountability.  Yet, what is needed is a drastic paradigm shift. The very dynamics of the sector are flawed by virtue of the difference in interests between those who fund and have the decision-making power, and those who are meant to benefit from these programs.

As it is, the donor agencies operate at the behest of international financial agencies which are proxies for the donor countries. They have set concrete goals for the ‘developing nation’, ear marked funds for ‘whichever development problem is en vogue that year’ and are committed to finding the middle men and overseeing program implementation.

We, as the middle men engaged in the NGO sector, may have major decision-making power in implementing the program and a connectedness to ground realties but at the end of the day our loyalties lie more towards padding our CVs and sustaining a conduit of funding from our foreign patrons rather than a deeper commitment towards real change. Truth be told; it is not my daughter who will benefit from the girls’ schools, neither my community from the sewage system nor my family from the micro loan. At best, I can empathise with the plight of the millions, but their plight is not mine.

So in effect allowing the donors to define the problem, program’s strategies and us to implement the program, while the people are incorporated as passive recipients of ‘development’ will mean just that; the people will remain passive.

In fact, beyond the de-politicisation of the people, the development sector has systematically de-politicised the problem.  By proposing band aid solutions to pervasive issues that have socio economic and political dimensions they have trivialised these problems. As if eradication of poverty is a question of access to micro loans, deprivation of quality education can be addressed by random donor funded programs or social entrepreneurship ventures that hardly cater to a fraction of the population.

This donor or market driven paradigm makes the government less important; and regardless the focus on advocacy by many NGOs, beyond policy dialogues and lukewarm civil engagement this sector will never burst into a radical display of street power. The government is happy outsourcing its responsibilities and the development sector comfortable with incorporating them as a dismissive partner. Thus the activism of the people from where social change should stem from and the government it is meant to rattle; both are absent from our development paradigm and this explains the impotency of this model of ‘manufactured dissent’.

Nonetheless, though I agree with Manto’s words, I also believe the solution lies within them; the pressing need to adopt radical notions of development entirely fed from organic peoples’ movements. NGOs need to reorient themselves in order to build participatory networks and democracy at grass root level so that they stop being the planters of ‘change’ and let the people be the instigators of it. The fuel for development will be the passion and commitment of the most desperate and marginalised, and in harnessing this not only will the development sector find itself powerful enough to simply implement poverty alleviation, education or health-related programs but also to dismantle the very structures that are perpetuating the deprivation of basic necessities and freedoms.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.