Humanitarian support tied to transparency:PEW

Lahore: The Pakistan Economy Watch (PEW) on Tuesday proposed establishing a powerful NGOs Regulatory Authority to monitor and streamline the activities, funding and expenses by non-profits.

At present no one is fully aware of what is happening in the development sector paving way to suspicions at home and abroad.

Lack of proper reporting and scrutiny procedure by governmental has been raising concerns about overlapping of activities, wastage of efforts, misuse of resources, and improper aid distribution, said Dr Murtaza Mughal, President PEW.

The government should rationalize the process of registration of NGOs as it has no record of the exact number of civic groups while different NGOs are getting registered at different federal and provincial departments, he said.

Dr Murtaza Mughal said that the process of registration should be entrusted to a single federal department because different departments registering civil society groups do not share data.

He further said that there must be a dependable web portal where all the local and international donors and non-profits can upload all the particulars of the projects, grants, activities, and expanses for public information and scrutiny.

After the floods of 2010; NDMA took a pioneering initiative of introducing Single Reporting Format (SRF Pakistan) but after archiving the results of hundreds of humanitarian activities and training thousands of NGOs & iNGOs staff members; this reporting system, developed by iMMAP, was abundant early last year due to obvious reasons.

Dr Mughal said that newly-elected Government should utilize IT for reporting and spreading information to achieve uniformity and coherence in data sharing during emergencies and other non-emergency situations.

He appreciated the efforts of the SECP in developing better regulatory environment, addressing issues confronting regulation of the NGOs sector.

Calling for a major review of the situation said that Pakistan will not attract foreign donors unless it ensures proper transparency, accountability and good governance in the civil society organizations and within the government to gain credibility.

Consultation is imperative during the process to allay fears of restriction of the legitimate funding and operations of independent groups.