A former senior development specialist at USAID Pakistan reflects on a quarter-century of managing aid programmes, arguing that international donors consistently overlook authentic grassroots organisations in favour of professional, proposal-driven NGOs that are accountable to funders rather than communities.
A Market Lesson in Islamabad
On a hot and humid August day in an Islamabad market, not far from a comfortable, air-conditioned office at the US embassy, I waited for a mechanic to fix my car. Despite the heat, the market was unusually alive. I asked the mechanic’s helper what was happening. “Today we are electing our association,” he told me, and I could hear the pride in his voice. Intrigued, I walked around and listened.
Every small gathering was deep in animated discussion: the problems facing shopkeepers, government indifference to their needs, the threat of forced eviction – officials wanted to relocate the “dirty” mechanics from the city centre to the outskirts. The atmosphere, the posters, the banners, the sheer intensity of argument could easily put many national elections to shame. I could not stop myself from thinking: this is real grassroots civil society in action.
The Gap Between Funding and Reality
In 25 years of working in the development sector and managing millions of dollars in civil society funding, I never once saw a donor fund an organisation such as this. That gap between what we funded and what actually existed tells you almost everything about what has gone wrong with international aid’s relationship with civil society. With USAID now dismantled and the entire model of western development assistance under scrutiny, this question has never been more urgent.
We created a parallel universe of professional NGOs – accountable to their donors in Washington or London, but to no one on the ground. Civil society fills the vacuum between the state and the market – it is where people with shared interests organise to do what neither government nor commerce will do. It is inherently organic, membership based and accountable to its members. The shopkeepers’ association I witnessed was precisely this: people pooling resources to elect leadership and resolve problems the government would not and the market could not.
Why Donors Missed the Mark
Pakistan was born with a relatively weak civil society, dominated by a powerful military and an efficient civil bureaucracy – both legacies of a colonial past. Colonies do not run on organised populations. Yet societies always find ways to organise themselves. Market associations, religious welfare networks, professional guilds, neighbourhood councils – these exist everywhere in Pakistan, self-financed and genuinely representative of those they serve.
Somehow, donors never found them. Or rather, they looked right past them. What donors funded instead, quite generously, were those groups established specifically to attract their money. Tight deadlines, pressure to disburse quickly and proposal-driven procurement created an entire ecosystem of professional NGOs that had more in common with contractors than with civil society. They had no deep commitment to any specific cause and were accountable not to their members but to their funders. An organisation working on women’s empowerment one year would pivot to disaster response the next – not because of expertise or passion, but because that was where the money was. Genuine civil society rarely appeared on donors’ radar, because it lacked the one thing donors valued: the ability to write a proposal in fluent English.
Accountability Gap and the ‘Usual Suspects’
The accountability gap made this worse. In my experience, donors scrutinise government expenditures forensically – every receipt, every procurement, every budget line. With NGOs, they were consistently more lenient, despite abundant evidence that the problems they feared in government – corruption, misuse of funds, political capture – existed equally in the NGO sector. This leniency was partly ideological: civil society was seen as inherently more virtuous than the state. It was also practical: holding NGOs to the same standard would have disrupted the disbursement machinery everyone depended on.
There is another dimension that rarely gets discussed. When senior officials from Washington or London visited Pakistan, meetings with “civil society representatives” were arranged by embassy and USAID staff – including, for many years, myself. We always invited the same articulate, English-speaking, internationally networked NGOs whose staff knew how to perform civil society for a foreign audience. We jokingly called them “the usual suspects”. With them, there was little risk of uncomfortable truths reaching visiting dignitaries. With genuine civil society members, it is difficult to control the narrative – and unscripted candour could create problems for donor and embassy staff alike. The shopkeepers’ association had no voice in these conversations. It lacked the institutional vocabulary to be heard.
Consequences and a Better Way Forward
The consequences are visible. In Pakistan, as in many recipient countries, you regularly hear people described as the “owner” of an NGO – as if it were a private business. Boards exist on paper only. Leadership is permanent or stays within family networks. The organisations meant to bridge the distance between citizens and the state have themselves become a kind of parallel industry, answerable to external funders rather than internal members.
None of this was the intention. Donors genuinely believe that funding civil society strengthens democracy and holds governments accountable. The problem is that the civil society they created bears little resemblance to the thing they meant to strengthen.
What would a better approach look like? At minimum, donors should invest in understanding what civil society actually exists before deciding what to fund. They should develop mechanisms – however imperfect – to reach organisations that cannot write proposals in English but are genuinely rooted in communities. They should apply the same accountability standards to NGOs that they apply to governments. And they should be honest about the difference between an implementing partner – which is what most funded organisations actually are – and a genuine civil society actor.
A Final Reflection
That afternoon in the Islamabad market, nobody was thinking about donor priorities or project timelines. They were arguing about who should lead their association and why. It was messy, loud and completely authentic – exactly what civil society is supposed to look like. We never funded it. And perhaps, on reflection, that is just as well. Donor money has a way of changing what it touches – making organisations proposal-dependent, pulling them away from members and towards funders. Countries such as Pakistan may have more genuine civil society than donors ever saw. The greatest service now might be to leave it alone.
