NGOs alarmed at minister's criticism

Aid agencies in the Afghan capital Kabul have expressed concern at a government minister who called NGOs ineffective and accused them of squandering Afghan reconstruction money. Ramazan Bashardoost, Afghan minister of planning, made the controversial comments at the Afghanistan Development Forum's two-day meeting in the capital last Tuesday. The government is unhappy that the majority of aid money coming into the country is channelled through NGOs rather than through official channels at a time when it wants to be seen to delivering on reconstruction pledges. Bashardoost said the government had had a negative experience of NGO input into reconstruction work over the past two years and that if more donor funds were not directed through government in future, state institutions might collapse. "This issue will be a more serious threat to the government than warlords and commanders," Bashardoost said in his speech, which was broadcast by state-run Kabul TV last Wednesday evening. According to the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR), an umbrella group representing over 90 national and international aid agencies in Afghanistan, NGOs were very disappointed by the allegations made by the minister. "We are concerned that there have been statements that have been very negative about NGOs and the role they play here," Paul O'Brien, an advocacy coordinator for CARE international, told IRIN in Kabul on Monday. O'Brien said such an attitude would make the work of NGOs increasingly difficult and would cause further insecurity for aid agencies in the field. According to CARE, NGOs rely for their security mostly on the trust and cooperation of the communities where they work. "If they [communities] constantly get messages from their own government that NGOs are doing nothing to help them, then our most important source of security may be undermined," he warned. This is the second time in just over a year that the Afghan government has questioned the role of NGOs in rehabilitation of the war ravaged country. In March 2003, the Planning Ministry called for a new regulatory framework to control what NGOs were spending on reconstruction work. With elections scheduled for September, there is a lot of political pressure on President Hamid Karzai's fledgling government to be seen to be delivering reconstruction to the people. Many ordinary Afghans want to know that the resources they had heard were available - close to US $ 2 billion in aid over the past two years - have not had much impact on the ground. And NGOs are increasingly blamed as they are seen as implementers. There are over 1,500 national and over 300 international NGOs registered with the Ministry of Planning. But CARE believes the majority of these agencies are not real NGOs. "They are either NGOs for tax purposes or they are those opportunists that have set up NGOs to get the resources and steal resources from the Afghan people," the advocacy coordinator said. Meanwhile, Mohammad Hashim Mayar, a programme coordinator for ACBAR, told IRIN that the NGO umbrella organisation was drafting a letter to Karzai, asking for a fresh government commitment to working together with responsible NGOs for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, following Bashardoost's comments. "NGOs work for peace, reconstruction and development, not conflicts and destruction. Therefore, it is outrageous to compare NGOs with warlords," the programme coordinator said. ACBAR called on the Ministry of Planning to develop a mechanism for collecting and analysing data from NGOs for ensuring more coordination and accountability. "What we really need is legislation that defines and separates responsible agencies from all of those NGOs that are not NGOs, and legally requires us to maintain high standards," he said. According to officials at the Planning Ministry, draft regulatory legislation is in the pipeline. "A large number of current NGOs will be blacklisted and cancelled after a certain screening by a group of experts," an official of the ministry, who declined to be named, told IRIN.