Focus on NGOs and community development in Balochistan

Although NGOs have mushroomed in thousands, rutted roads, open sewers, flying plastic bags, swarms of flies and nets of electricity wires hanging overhead in Nawai Killi, or new village, in the suburbs of Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province, present a grim picture of community development. With an estimated population of over 100,000, Nawai Killi is a huge settlement, separated from Quetta city by a sparkling military cantonment. Massum Khan Kakar, a community activist in the village, told IRIN that they faced all imaginable miseries. "You can see it, we don't have a functioning water supply, we have no sanitation, and unemployment is very common," he said. "Many young people in the community are drug addicts. We are 100 years behind Quetta." Middle-aged Kakar looks after his six children. Living in a three-roomed mud house, he is relatively well off. He works for a community based organisation, Shajar, and has contributed towards the establishment of many local institutions, including a women's skills development centre, and committees tasked with improving health and sanitation. "We are eager to go ahead, but there are hardly any opportunities," he said. Kakar asserted that many NGOs had initiated projects in the locality, but most of them had failed. "They brought experts from other places who even failed to install a sewerage line correctly," he said, gesturing towards the open sewerage lines in the dusty lanes. There is only one government-run primary school for girls, and a single a health-care unit, which lacks staff, medicines and equipment. For many, Nawai Killi is a heaven compared to thousands of other villages in Balochistan - the country's largest province. Established in the early 1970s, the province has the lowest human development indicators in the country. Often referred to by community development activists as a "graveyard of development projects", the province faces grim economic social and political prospects. Besides being the country's most underdeveloped province, Balochistan suffers from multiple ethnic problems arising between its Baloch, Brahvi, Pashtun and other inhabitants. Experts believe that the province is mostly regarded as a security problem by the country's establishment, even when the people there shared the burden of up to a million Afghan refugees over the past two decades. Society is overwhelmingly steeped in centuries-old traditions of tribalism and feudalism, with women at the receiving end. Only one percent of them are literate. Adding to the province's already bleak prospects is the ongoing regional drought, which has played havoc with the mostly agrarian and pastoralist livelihoods of its inhabitants. Over the past decade, NGOs have gradually emerged as key stakeholders in developing the province. Projects ranging from community water management to micro-credit, health care and women's development are common. Many of Quetta's fashionable quarters house NGO offices in which young men and women are hard at work. There are many perspectives on the subject, but success stories are hard to find. Nonetheless, NGO activist maintain that development is an ongoing process, initiated in Balochistan only relatively recently. "Time will be needed to show results" is a common adage among NGO workers. But while millions of dollars are being spent annually on aiding the province, little impact is reflected by its diverse rural and urban communities. Explaining the background of the NGO movement in the province, Nasrullah, director of the Development Association of Youth, a local NGO, told IRIN that international development agencies, such as the German technical assistance agency, GTZ, and the World Bank, had initiated projects in the province, which were eventually turned into nongovernmental institutions. Coincidentally with the influx of Afghan refugees in early 1980, aid agencies established an extensive presence in the province, mostly in the areas bordering Afghanistan. Today, a broad spectrum of more than 3,000 NGOs - ranging from high-profile international and national organisations to small community based groups in the villages - operate in the province's developmental arena. "There is a great need of evolving capacities of thousands of local, community based organisations," Nasrullah stressed. Most of the projects are run by larger national and international NGOs. "Communities should decide for themselves, and outside agencies should only facilitate them," he said. Asked whether the NGOs had contributed to improvements in human development, he maintained that the human development indicators had in fact deteriorated. "The basic dilemma is that the people's traditional institutions are being destroyed without being replaced by new ones," he said. Nasrullah hails from Quetta, and his own upward struggle from being a juvenile worker in a factory to an NGO worker and now manager of his own organisation illustrates a certain degree of success on the part of NGOs and their contribution towards human development. Highlighting a key problem encountered by many NGOs in reaching out to the communities, Aysha Ayyub pointed out that many organisations were not reaching the poorest of the poor. Ayyub’s organisation, Seher, works on community empowerment in the remote rural communities of the province. She explained that as Balochistan was at the crossroads of South and Central Asia, stereotype models from other areas could not be implemented there. "As an example, there is very little domestic violence, and any projects on that will not be successful," she said. A World Bank senior community development specialist, Qazi Azmat Isa, stressed that even nature performed a harsh role in the province with the ongoing regional drought and a fragile ecosystem threatening the livelihoods of very poor communities. Isa is one of the pioneers of community development in Balochistan. "We never strike a happy medium, and swing from one extreme to another," he said, commenting on the assertion that NGOs have to a large extent proved ineffective in promoting community development. However, he maintained that one of the fundamental reasons for the inadequacy of NGOs was that their agendas were donor-driven with severe dependence on donors for financial support. "One of the fundamental problems is that the development agenda is not the agenda of the people," he said. Suggesting measures to improve community development in the province, he underlined the need for a long-term commitment to the sector. "We have started from zero there, and NGOs will need greater access to knowledge, resources and the best practices," he added. Moreover, political commitment and bringing women into the mainstream were urgently needed measures. "Balochistan is very heterogeneous, and you need to tailor strategies accordingly," he maintained. He said he believed that with the creation of a suitable environment, things might even improve quite quickly.