Given the spate of recent natural disasters, growing malnourishment and lingering basic health problems, such as the prevalence of easily preventable diseases, require redoubled efforts by development workers to help meet the challenge of reaching out to help vulnerable communities.While the need for relevant programmatic interventions to be designed effectively — and to be given enough funds — remains vital, there is also the prerequisite of development workers being able to safely access those most in need. However, the growing security threat has now become an evident deterrent in allowing development work from taking place in our country.
While development aid and relief work is meant to be impelled by basic humanitarian principles, including neutrality and operational independence, aid workers in developing countries do often find themselves caught up in political, ethnic and religious tensions.
The politics of aid and the manner in which relief work is conducted can cause varied forms of tensions amongst different stakeholders. Besides cultural infringements by aid interventions or workers, which can lead to disgruntlement within the communities they intervene, more genuine attempts to reach out to those most in need can also incur the wrath of the local elite, who feel sidelined from exerting control over development schemes. And, of course, aid workers provide soft targets to extremist, militant and criminal elements, which is, perhaps, the biggest concern in Pakistan at the moment.
Governments of developing countries in a similar situation like ours become reluctant to allow relief and rehabilitation interventions in conflict areas, despite the urgency of alleviating suffering in such environments. On one hand, governments hesitate in allowing development interventions in problematic areas to prevent bringing these areas into the glare of public scrutiny. On the other hand, however, there is genuine lack of state capacity to adequately offer protection to development workers, so it finds it more convenient to increasingly regulate their activities.
Both local and international aid and humanitarian workers are now increasingly complaining about being unable to reach out and help marginalised people in different parts of the country without being hassled by the authorities or without peril to their own life. A number of aid agencies have closed, paused or restricted their services. Their actions are justified given how many aid workers working on flood and drought relief and education have been targeted in Balochistan over the past year. International development workers have been abducted and killed in Lahore. A series of militant attacks have been linked to the ongoing national polio eradication campaign in Karachi and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Pakistan, thus, remains one of the few countries where polio has not yet been eradicated. Other preventable diseases, like measles, have also reached epidemic proportions.
Delegating the police and Rangers to accompany polio vaccination teams is not a sustainable solution. Similar protection cannot be offered to the range of community-level interventions across the country. Instead, a more secure environment needs to be created for NGOs and aid agencies to do their work.
The government can take stricter action against those who falsely accuse NGOs or aid workers of being spies, Christian proselytisers or trying to sterilise Muslim babies through polio drops. Humanitarian agencies must also look inwards to prevent any actions which undermine their neutrality and independence, and the media, too, can play a positive role and create a less hazardous and more enabling environment for development workers to work in.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 6th, 2013.