While the government repeatedly recalls Pakistan’s major macro-economic gains, poverty affecting 33 percent of the population is a stark reminder of the unmet challenge. Clearly without beginning poverty rollback, these gains will only widen the dangerous and destructive divide within Pakistan — the rich-poor divide. A country battling with divides along ethnic, sectarian and regional lines, can ill afford this.
Like previous governments this government too, with donor “advice”, has launched special social sector planning and financing initiatives. They include the Pakistan Poverty Fund, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Program and the National Commission for Human Development.
While results from such initiatives are slow, the accelerated moves to develop the micro-finance sector are one assured way of fighting poverty head-on. Help the poor with funds, technical know-how and market. They may be on way to reclaiming dignity, health and job security and economic prosperity. Simultaneously development of micro-finance will encourage private sector development and the investors’ confidence in the overall growth of the economy.
President Musharraf made this point at the recent international Micro-Finance Conference organized in Islamabad.
That economic progress without narrowing the poor-rich divides can neither be sustainable nor an instrument of peace and prosperity in society was the point made by major practitioners from the region. These included the legendary head of the Grameen Bank, the heads of India’s SEWA Bank, of Bank Rakyat Indonesia and Central Bank Sri Lanka. As did others from far-off Kenya and Bolivia.
Clearly the cornerstone of the new development paradigm has essentially been that development represents transformation of a society, not merely delivery of some basic human needs. Hence such a transformation flows from and encompasses not only what we do, but how we do it and collectively as a society factoring in the “marginalized” and the “excluded”. It has therefore to be backed by new thought, policies, strategies and processes. Without ownership and participation, without collectively dreaming and articulating the vision of a better way of being, without transparency and accountability and without prioritization transformation of society is not possible.
Pakistan’s own experience with development reaffirms the assertions of the new development paradigm. Numerous factors contributed to the lack of Pakistan’s successful development efforts: The evolution of a “disorganic” state with its weak linkages and often confrontation with sections of civil society; the state’s often misdirected and unaccountable development mandate; the near absence of effectively functioning democratic institutions and the state’s ascendant “control” culture; the “leeway to err” available to the state in the absence of operational centers of power within civil society and the presence of external security threats; the “external” donor factor that provided an “enabling environment” to a poorly performing state. At the core of this development failure was also the absence of a partnership between the state and society in both defining and pursuing the goal of human progress.
Like many other countries going through transition, the Pakistani state and society, are also revisiting the goals of progress and development.
There is awareness that the “humanization of development” by placing human needs at the heart of the development practice, planning and discourse is essential.
Any viable progress strategy must take a holistic approach. It must focus on the evolving political dynamics, the interplay between politics, religion, development, and the state institutions.
Today’s challenge is to the totality of human existence — one that does not lend itself to piecemeal responses. Neither projects nor manufacturing industry alone is the response. Equally important are the other essentials of the broad context including the confidence and credibility levels of the various development stakeholders, their practices, their discourse, their institutions and legal frameworks and their knowledge, and moral mooring.
— Nasim Zehra is a fellow, Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass.
