Category: Blog

In January 2018, when the abduction, rape and murder of Zainab Ansari, a 7-year-old girl in Kasur – the latest at the time in a series of brutal instances of sexual abuse of minors in the area – led to a public furor[i], we set out to map civil society organizations (“CSOs”) in Pakistan working in the field of child abuse. At the outset, we decided to spread the net wide and to reach out to CSOs whose work we identified at face value as relating broadly to child rights and child protection (“CRCP”).[ii] Our working assumptions were that CSOs working directly on child abuse were likely to be small in number, and that even within this sample CSOs were likely to integrate their work on child abuse within a larger agenda on CRCP. The objective of this mapping exercise at the time was threefold: firstly, to simply document the credible CSOs that were actively involved in some way or to some extent in CRCP, and to get a sense of how inclusive these CRCP agendas were of issues related to child abuse, in particular sex abuse, issues; secondly, to observe whether and how CSOs mobilize around specific incidents or events (presently, the highly publicized case of Zainab); and thirdly, to explore the quality of voluntary linkages between different CSOs or amongst clusters of CSOs working on CRCP. The latter objective was motivated by our curiosity to learn more about how thick and overlapping the CSO network is in relation to child abuse issues. In other words, what is the nature of connections between CSOs and to what extent are these connections based on mutual relations of trust and reciprocity (thick); and how many CSOs are involved in the same or similar kind of activity (overlapping). These kinds of questions about voluntary association between CSOs have implications for evolving a broader consensus on a given issue or set of issues, openness to information transfer and resource pooling, and capacity for collective action and mobilization.

Below we present a list of CSOs we identified and mapped (i.e. interviewed in person or over the phone) between January and March 2018. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Because of paucity of both time and access to information, we limited ourselves to 13 CSOs that had a visible presence online and responded to our request for a candid conversation on their organizational structure, nature of work, funding sources, partnerships, general perceptions about other CSOs and government departments working in the same field, and sphere of work particularly in relation to child abuse (with a particular focus on sex abuse). We categorize these 13 CSOs according to a typology based on three ideal types of core CSO activity: “service providers,” “capacity builders,” and “advocacy organizations.” The combinations we have identified on the basis of this typology are: service providers, service providers & capacity builders, service providers & advocacy organizations, capacity builders & advocacy organizations, service providers, capacity builders & advocacy organizations, and advocacy organizations.[iii] We hope to add to this list over the course of the coming months and to expand our inquiry to issues beyond child abuse in order to further develop our working hypotheses on the nature and organization of civil society spaces in Pakistan. We end with some early observations from our mapping exercise.

SERVICE PROVIDERS

(1)                Bali Memorial Trust

Bali is a Lahore-based CSO that provides “holistic services to the underprivileged,” including education, health, old people’s sanctuaries, girls’ shelters and orphanages, a women’s crisis center, and a general helpline center. Bali’s mantra is that its services are “broad and inclusive” and “cater to the needs of the community.” The first point of contact at Bali is through its weekly “walk-in days” where anyone in need of assistance can simply drop by. Bali aims to deal with all facets of a crisis, providing some services themselves and outsourcing others through a referral system. Services include medical help, school stipends, psychological help, speech therapy for children, and sanctuaries and shelters.

Rabia Usman – the Program Manager at Bali – explains that child abuse is seldom reported directly. Recognition of such issues usually arises during conversations with women approaching Bali in crisis situations. Abused children who need psychological help along with temporary shelter can stay at an in-house crisis center that Bali runs from its office premises. Importantly, this crisis center attempts to plug a major loophole in the existing legal framework in Punjab: it offers shelter to boys in the 16-18 “transitional” age group who have been left out of the protective cover provided by the Child Protection Bureau.

(2)                Idara Aaghosh

Aaghosh is a Lahore-based CSO that works in the field of CRCP, with a focus on the emotional well-being of abused, exploited and neglected children on the street, runaway children, and those involved in child labor, delinquent or criminal activity, or sex trade. The core services provided by Aaghosh have shifted in the past few years due to various constraints, including funding problems and governmental pressures.

Naseer Ahmed – the founder of and General Secretary at Aaghosh – shares that in the early 2000s, Aaghosh focused on rehabilitating abused children through education. It set up a charitable school network across Punjab (comprising 36 schools) known as the Aaghosh Schools System. At its peak, this System had a total enrolment of 2,000 children. A change in government policies, however, compelled the System to shut down, causing Aaghosh to transfer all its students to government schools while continuing to help and liaison with the children’s families. Many children dropped out of school during this transition. After the closure of the Aaghosh Schools, Aaghosh began community building work in Sargodha, including renovation of baithaks or community centers, vocational training for women, and sensitization of Imams at local mosques to mobilize communities to enroll out-of-school children in school. Through this work, Aaghosh has dealt indirectly with child abuse issues on a case-by-case basis but concedes its inability to expand the scope of this intervention because of the “cultural context.”

(3)                Ittehad Foundation

Ittehad is a Kasur-based grass-roots CSO with a broad mission of empowerment, literacy and capacity-building of women, children and youth. One limb of its work relates to achieving CRCP through children’s education and community awareness programs. Ittehad provides both formal and non-formal education to children in Kasur free of cost. It started its operations from a small non-formal center in a katchi abadi in 2001 with 30 children when there were no public schools in the area. The aim was to create a smooth transition for out-of-school children, including those involved in child labor. This first center is now a formal school with a current capacity of 150 children. Ittehad continues to operate a number of non-formal schools in localities with high child labor populations in order to integrate education and awareness about child protection into this very vulnerable group of children.

Irshad Safdar – the current Chairperson of Ittehad – states that since January 2018 when the incident of the rape and murder of Zainab arose, Ittehad has been partnering with Sahil (see below) to develop and integrate CRCP awareness materials into the curricula for both their formal and non-formal schools. Ittehad plans to work not only with children and students, but also parents and communities through CRCP trainings and community mobilization.

(4)                Alpha Foundation

Alpha is a Kasur-based grass-roots CSO working in the field of literacy and community development with a focus on children between the ages of 5 and 14 who are employed as labor in tanneries and leather industries.  As part of a recent 5-year program, Alpha has established 12 non-formal education centers across the Kasur district for providing literacy programs to working children who are not enrolled in school. These centers allow children to work while motivating them to experience a school-like experience for a few hours every day. Other components of this program are mobilization of mothers and communities to allow their children to attend the centers after work, as well as awareness programs for factory owners to facilitate working children’s participation in Alpha’s centers. Through this program, Alpha has enabled 180 girl-students to sit for grade 5 board exams and mainstream into formal public schools.

Jawwad Bukhari – the Chairperson of Alpha – states that like other Kasur-based CSOs, Alpha is presently collaborating with Sahil (see below) to integrate CRCP awareness materials into their educational programs in their non-formal centers.

(5)                Good Thinkers Organization (GTO)

GTO is a Kasur-based grass-roots CSO working broadly on human development with a special focus on transgender communities and women, and to a lesser extent, on children. In relation to their work on children, GTO has focused in the recent past on mainstreaming out-of-school children through “drop-in centers” for working and street children to transition them to public schools over time. In 2012, GTO began with 55 children, and was successful in mainstreaming over 200 children in public schools in Kasur through Grade 5 board exams. With respect to child abuse in particular, GTO organized awareness campaigns through local events in both 2015 and 2018, and also provided legal aid and other legal support for some children affected by the child sexual abuse and trafficking scandal that emerged in 2015.

Awais – the Program Officer at GTO – shares that GTO has not been able to sustain much of its work on children because of major financial constraints. He explains that quite apart from the government refusing to allocate funds to child rights issues, international donors dealing with child rights are generally very reluctant to come to Kasur, and funding is fast drying up in this area.

 

SERVICE PROVIDERS & CAPACITY BUILDERS

(6)                KONPAL Child Abuse Prevention Society

KONPAL is a Karachi-based CSO that has a direct focus on child abuse, including child sex abuse and commercial sexual exploitation, child labor in hazardous occupations, and violence against children generally. KONPAL works with four main groups of “stakeholders”: doctors, teachers, mothers and children. Its larger aim is to create awareness among these stakeholders of issues relating to child abuse.

Dr. Aisha Mehnaz – the current Chairperson – explains that because a large majority of professionals associated with KONPAL are doctors, most of their activities tend to be centered on doctors and hospitals. For instance, KONPAL has set up Child Protection Committees (“CPCs”) in a number of major hospitals in Karachi as a way of integrating medical treatment for child abuse into the hospitals’ service provision. Through these committees, KONPAL trains medical staff to recognize and deal with cases of sex abuse, corporal punishment and parental neglect of children coming into these hospitals for medical treatment, and to provide rehabilitative care to the affected children. Some of the CPCs continue to function, but KONPAL is no longer directly involved in funding or monitoring them because of resistance from government hospitals and the general lack of prioritization by the government of the health sector.

More recently, KONPAL’s work has shifted to providing capacity-building trainings to doctors and medical practitioners generally to help them identify and appropriately respond to instances of child abuse.

(7)                Protection and Help of Children Against Abuse and Neglect (PAHCHAAN)

PAHCHAAN is a Lahore-based CSO with a mission to protect and empower children against abuse and neglect and build the capacity of care-givers and duty-bearers (parents, service-providers and government) in relation to child abuse. PAHCHAAN’s approach to CRCP is to focus on the larger “ecological environment” of children; in other words, to integrate children’s rights into healthcare, education, and community mobilization. PAHCHAAN’s earliest project, now running for over 10 years, is the Child Protection Unit at Children’s Hospital, Lahore (“CPU”). The CPU comprises of regular hospital staff that has been trained by PAHCHAAN to make early detections of a broad spectrum of abuse cases, including neglect, violence, psychological abuse, and sex abuse. If this trained staff suspects child abuse, they report it to a Child Protection Officer (“CPO”) – PAHCHAAN’s trained psychologist – in addition to providing medical treatment. The CPO then makes her own assessment and offers counselling services to the abused child and his/her parents and family. PAHCHAAN also covers social support expenditures for patients being counseled by the CPO (such as clothes, food, toys, etc.) as a large majority of them come from outside of Lahore straight into emergency.

Mehak Zafar – the Coordinator at PAHCHAAN – explains that the organization also offers legal help where it is needed through referral to a small group of pro bono lawyers. However, “95 % of the times” people decline legal help, partly because they don’t believe that there is a moral problem with child abuse and partly because of the complications they anticipate in dealing with the legal system.

PAHCHAAN’s more recent work is centered on children’s education. This includes community mobilization programs that seek to sensitize communities toward enrolling out-of-school children in school, and to raise awareness on important social issues like cleanliness, child marriage, etc. The latest education-centered program involves establishing Child Rights Departments (“CPDs”) in college and higher education institutions to integrate child protection into academia. PAHCHAAN has just set up its first CPD at the School of Integrated Social Sciences at University of Lahore.

SERVICE PROVIDERS & ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS

(8)                Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC)

SPARC is a country-wide CSO, headquartered in Islamabad with regional offices in Rawalpindi, Hyderabad, Peshawar, and Multan. Its mission is to promote and protect the rights of children through advocacy supported by research, awareness raising, service delivery, and human and institutional development. Its sphere of action relates to child labor, bonded labor, street children, juvenile justice, education, child marriage, and child sex abuse. SPARC’s forte is its advocacy for child rights, for which it releases an annual “State of Pakistan’s Children” report. In addition to this flagship report, SPARC’s current advocacy focus is on juvenile justice and the responsibilities of the relevant authorities under the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance, 2000. Aligned with this advocacy is SPARC’s work on improving conditions in juvenile prisons and securing the release of as many children as possible from jails. On the service provision front, SPARC runs several Centers for Street Children (“CSCs”) – though a few have been shut down recently due to lack of funding – and provides technical and vocational skills to 6,000 girls and young women in Multan and Muzzafargarh.

Farshad Iqbal – the Coordinator at the Islamabad office – states that this latter project relating to provision of technical and vocational skills caters to adolescent and college-level girls between the ages of 16 and 18 from very poor households who have been victims of early and forced child marriages. SPARC, he says, is filling a big vacuum in the government’s child protection policy that does not empower the Ministry of Human Rights to provide dedicated child protection units for girls of this age group.

With respect to child abuse, SPARC reports on child abuse and related issues annually in its flagship report. It also undertook a special fact-finding on Zainab’s case in early 2018, which is available, at the time of writing, on SPARC’s website.

(9)    AGHS Child Rights Unit (CRU)

CRU is a Lahore-based CSO focusing on advocacy, awareness, and legislative reform around issues relating to child protection, including violence against children, child labor, girl child marriages, and juvenile justice. The core activity of CRU is highlighting systemic and procedural faults in the criminal justice system in order to inform and push for legislative reform. Two areas in which CRU has worked extensively to influence policy and legislation are juvenile justice and prison reform for vulnerable groups (mainly women and children). Specially with respect to prison reform, CRU undertakes regular jail visits to document all the serious issues with custodial methodology, and to closely monitor children in jails, most of whom are simply accompanying their incarcerated mothers. In addition, CRU organizes community awareness programs with parents on issues of child labor, child sex abuse, and child marriages.

CRU does not primarily focus on legal aid or assistance. However, it does at times deal with “urgent relief cases” in relation to children in jail and/or involved in criminal police investigation or trial processes as victims, the accused or witnesses. In such cases, CRU helps in taking children out of jail, getting children bail, or monitoring trial processes involving children. It also refers or facilitates the transfer of criminal cases involving children to the newly established Child Protection Courts in Punjab.

Sabahat Riaz – the Coordinator at CRU – explains that the CRU was originally a program of the AGHS Legal Aid Cell but is now physically and financially housed within Dastak, a sister concern of the AGHS Legal Aid Cell that runs a shelter house for women and children. This allows CRU to be fully integrated into the services offered by Dastak, while also enabling it to refer cases of legal aid to the AGHS Legal Aid Cell. However, CRU is not a financially independent entity and depends on Dastak for sustainability.

(10)            War Against Rape (WAR)

WAR is a Karachi-based CSO with a mission to advocate on behalf and for the rights of women and child victims of sex abuse and violence, and to provide crisis interventions for survivors of rape and domestic violence through free services like legal aid, psycho-therapeutic counseling and basic medical assistance. WAR’s core activities have remained fairly consistent over time and include ongoing awareness raising sessions at schools and other educational institutions about sexual violence, initial as well as long-term counseling and support for survivors of rape and domestic violence, and provision of free legal aid and legal counseling for such victims. WAR also has an aggressive advocacy component for legislative reform.

Beena Hasan – the Coordinator at WAR – states that WAR is the only not-for-profit organization in Karachi that provides such specialized services to survivors of sex abuse and domestic violence. WAR investigates a hundred cases of rape in Karachi each year on average and encourages survivors to press charges against the perpetrators. It prosecutes 20 cases on average within Karachi in a year – but it is unclear what proportion of these cases relates to child sex abuse.

 

CAPACITY BUILDERS & ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS

(11)            AAHUNG

Aahung is a Karachi-based CSO with a mission to improve the sexual and reproductive health and rights (“SRHR”) of women, men and adolescents. Aahung is the pioneering – and continues to be the leading – CSO on SRHR in Pakistan. In relation to children, Aahung has been working on the prevention of child sex abuse for almost a decade, mostly through training of teachers and parents to talk about sex abuse with children and young people. The organization has developed a Life Skills Based Education (“LSBE”) program, which is a comprehensive curriculum focusing on body protection and child sex abuse prevention. Through the LSBE, Aahung integrates sexual and reproductive health awareness along with prevention awareness for sex abuse into secondary school curricula. Hence, Aahung works closely with schools and community-based organizations.

Aisha Ijaz – the Program Manager at Aahung – states that the organization was experiencing serious bottlenecks in operationalizing the LSBE in public schools because of non-cooperation from the Sindh government. But after Zainab’s case in early 2018, it was finally able to get a firm commitment from the government, which is now taking tangible steps to incorporate LSBE into the public secondary school curriculum.

 

SERVICE PROVIDERS, CAPACITY BUILDERS & ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS

(12)            Sahil

Sahil is a country-wide CSO, headquartered in Islamabad with regional offices in Lahore, Sukkur, Abbottabad and Jaffarabad. Its mission relates directly to child protection through the development of “a protective environment for children free from all forms of violence,” with a particular focus on child sex abuse. Each Sahil office provides two core services through trained resident staff: legal advice and referral, and psychological counselling.

Sahil’s work can be divided into four components. The first is a teacher training program on child protection, consisting of resource material for educational practitioners to create awareness around child abuse, in particular child sex abuse. Sameera – the Resident Psychologist at the Lahore Office – states that Sahil’s material is culturally sensitive and contains “soft messages” that can effectively get otherwise taboo concepts across without being offensive. Sahil also sensitizes and trains teachers to identify child abuse cases in the classroom and to communicate with abused children. Sahil’s teacher training programs are currently running in both private and public schools across the country.

The second component is Child Protection Networks (“CPNs”) which are essentially community programs offering general health awareness for both children and adolescents as well as awareness about child abuse. Sahil is presently involved in setting up CPNs at the village level with representation in Union Councils so that they may be linked through a larger referral support system to relevant public and private organizations at the district level. The third component of Sahil’s work is counselling services for affected children and families on a walk-in basis. The fourth is legal advice and aid provided through a resident legal advisor and a referral network of lawyers funded by Sahil. Most legal aid cases come to Sahil through teachers, community members in the CPNs, and Sahil’s own helpline.

 

ADVOCACY ORGANIZATIONS

(13)            Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP)

This mapping exercise would be incomplete without a mention of HRCP as the leading human rights advocacy organization in Pakistan. Fact-finding missions are HRCP’s flagship advocacy output. In 2015, HRCP undertook a middle-tier fact-finding mission on the child sex abuse and trafficking scandal in Kasur in partnership with a few other CSOs (including AGHS and South Asia Partnership Pakistan (SAP-PK)). The mission was led by Hina Jillani. A copy of the main observations from the fact-finding mission is available on file with IDEAS.

Some Early Observations

• Broadly, the 13 CSOs we mapped fell into 5 substantive categories: (i) general crisis assistance and advocacy, (ii) child rights and child protection (CRCP), (iii) sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), (iv) sex abuse and violence, and (v) specifically or predominantly child sex abuse. Most CSOs fit into (ii), 2 fell into (i), only 1 each fell into (iii) and (iv), and 2 fell into (v). The CSOs in this last category of child sex abuse are KONPAL and Sahil. All the other 11 respond to child abuse and/or sex abuse in some manner or degree, whether directly or indirectly. Mostly, however, activities and advocacy around child sex abuse are part either of a larger menu of issues in relation to CRCP or of a broader target population that includes children as one of more vulnerable groups. Nonetheless, there is much overlapping of issues relating to children in these CSOs, especially in those working on CRCP.
• As expected, we found much variation in the size, organizational structure, capacity, and social capital of CSOs working on CRCP. This very small sample size offers some very preliminary and tentative observations. Firstly, local grass-roots organizations tend largely to be service providers. This seems to go hand in hand with greater flexibility in the nature of their work, so they can shift periodically from one target population or issue to another in order to obtain sufficient and diversified funding, or a “survival budget,” to remain afloat. The nature of their work is, thus, either broadly defined or project-based. Secondly, service providers, whether at the grass-roots or higher level, tend generally to struggle financially and are more susceptible to quick changes in their core focus or activities. Thirdly, service providers who have graduated to becoming service providers & capacity builders tend to report greater financial stability, though at times at the expense of the service provision. This also seems to be the case for service providers & advocacy organizations which tend to have a relatively larger portfolio of advocacy activities. Finally, CSOs that rest on a very narrowly defined or highly specialized issue or activity tend also to have more organizational stability, report less resource constraints, and show greater consistency and focus in relation to their core work (examples include WAR (legal aid for victims of sex abuse), Aahung (SRHR), and Sahil (child abuse).
• While we did not include governmental departments and entities focused on CRCP in our preliminary study, we were able to elicit responses from many of the CSOs we mapped about the quality of their interaction with the government sector. We noted four kinds of CSO-government links that potentially impact the organization of civil society, the nature of CSOs’ work, and both the enabling and constraining factors that shape CSOs’ core activities. The first kind of link was defined by the need for CSOs involved in advocacy to lobby the government for legislative reform. Such activity necessitated a CSO-government link. The second kind of link was between CSOs involved in capacity-building of government-sector employees working in the CRCP field. Once again, this sort of activity positioned such CSOs within an overlapping space with the government. The third kind of link was between CSOs involved in capacity-building of specific stakeholders straddling the public and private sectors, such as teachers and doctors. This meant that while such CSOs did not routinely interact with the government, they nonetheless required the government’s formal cooperation to achieve scale. The fourth kind of link was an indirect one, in which CSOs involved in service provision designed CRCP programs and activities in response to the vacuum left behind by the government. Such CSOs tended to operate in a largely independent sphere.
• One very unexpected discovery while trying to gauge the institutional links and voluntary connections between the CSOs we mapped was that many of them were members of an increasingly organized group of CSOs known as the Child Rights Movement or “CRM.” The CRM is a country-wide network with secretariats at the national and provincial levels. The CRM secretariats are rotated annually through an electoral process that is based on a formal voting mechanism involving all CRM member organizations that fulfill minimum participation requirements in CRM dialogues and meetings. Organizations that hold the secretariat in any given year are expected to facilitate dialogue and consensus on the CRM’s collective agenda, implement an actionable plan relating to the agenda, lobby and liaison with concerned government departments for child rights, and lead and execute CRM’s advocacy targets. SPARC holds the national secretariat for CRM in 2018. There are roughly 46 CRM members at the national level, and 33 in CRM-Punjab. This remarkable voluntary association of CSOs that has emerged in the last decade offers a fertile field for studying this particular civil society space in Pakistan, its underlying social networks and relations, its internal structure and politics, and its modes of mobilization on issues relating to child rights.

 

Maryam S. Khan is a Research Fellow at IDEAS.

Dania Mukhtar  is a practicing lawyer based in Lahore and holds a Masters degree from Columbia Law School.

[i] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43096344

[ii] We excluded from our search CSOs that were primarily or wholly working in the general education and health sectors.

[iii] The boundaries between service provision, capacity building and advocacy can oftentimes be indistinct. We acknowledge that this typology is one of a number of possible ways of categorizing CSOs. Note that the CSOs in our list may or may not fully identify with this typological categorization, but based on our qualitative understanding of the CSOs’ work, we believe that this is a reasonable reflection of their current core activities.

 

Image source: A girl holds a sign while chanting to condemn the rape and killing of 7-year-old Zainab Ansari during a protest in Karachi, Pakistan, Jan. 13, 2018. (Reuters)

Pakistan continues to face significant social and economic challenges. Provision of basic services such as health and education falls short of international standards, while women and the poor are often wholly excluded from accessing these services. At a time when the government is under pressure to demonstrate fiscal restraint, a strong public financial management system can help state institutions improve service delivery geared towards promoting both economic growth and poverty reduction.

A strong financial management system needs three things – aggregate fiscal discipline, strategic allocation and prioritisation, and operational efficiency in service delivery. Pakistan lacks on all three fronts. Its system of governance rests on weak financial planning and poor performance management coupled with a lack of accountability across all levels of government. This blog looks at some of these challenges and what the new government can do to fix these.

Snapshot of a typical budget: Allocation versus execution

In the case of Pakistan, public financing, especially for the social sector exhibits certain patterns that are pervasive and consistent across different levels of government. While these trends are easy to identify and understand, they may not be as easy to correct.

One such example is the case of the sectoral allocations, which largely go towards non-development spending, and overall disbursements remain dominated by salary expenditure. Development expenditure forms a minor chunk of the entire budget and is plagued by low utilisation of funds. This is in addition to the consistently low overall allocations towards the social sector as a share of the total budget. Pakistan spends less than one percent of total GDP on health and close to 2 percent on education.

Let’s take the example of the public education sector in Punjab. It employs the largest workforce (around 400,000 employees), runs more than 52,000 schools and enrols more than 12 million students in the province. Overall expenditure on education has grown by an average of 6 percent each year between 2010-11 and 2016-17 with an average spending of 17 percent of the total provincial budget. Within the same period, non-development budget remained above 90 percent. On the budget execution side, utilisation of non-development budget remained high (above 90 percent, touching 99 percent in 2012-13). However, utilization of non-salary and development budget in the same period remained low at an average of 65 and 50 percent respectively. This usually happens on account of two factors: lack of capacity to spend and/or delay in release of funds by the provincial governments.

Gaps in public financing are also aggravated by the sheer size of the sector. With over 50,000 spending units (schools), the government’s accounting system is not sophisticated enough to be linked with, or capable of monitoring, each of these units. At the same time improvements in learning outcomes are only marginal. There is often a faint link between budgetary allocations and overall development outcomes. Despite a substantial increase in the development budget for Punjab’s education sector, over 11 million children in the province still remain out of school.

The example of the education sector points to an obvious gap between what is being allocated, spent and achieved. The situation is similar in other sectors, which is why Punjab was only able to spend 65 percent of its PKR 635 billion development budget in 2018. Some of this can be attributed to the mode of service delivery. Service delivery propagated through the roadmap approach, for example, focuses on a limited set of indicators, at the cost of the bigger picture. There is thus little accountability within the system in terms of meeting the broader, more policy level sectoral objectives.

While Pakistan struggles with the scarcity of high-quality data, existing household surveys should enable policymakers to assess whether impact against certain fundamental indicators has been achieved. Why is then the budget delinked with outcomes?

Lack of sectoral strategies

Budget exercises unguided by an overarching sectoral strategy or policy lead to poor execution. Hence outcomes remain unchanged. Most interventions are ad-hoc and designed on political whims, rather than on actual demand or a sectoral plan. The use of ‘quick-win’, limited target roadmaps to implement service delivery leads to investment in areas that do not address the root cause of the sector’s underperformance. The school education roadmap focused on reducing out of school children at the primary level without allocating adequate resources to secondary education. This means an increase in drop-outs at a later stage i.e. more out of school children at the secondary level. Moreover, the budget making process is driven more by the available fiscal space and less by government priorities. Thus, the budget is invariably an incremental one.

Development overshadowed by political priorities

Elected politicians are held accountable on service delivery rather than on their ability to legislate or make new policies. They have little incentives to develop sectoral strategies, or deliver on the promises of sectoral strategies in the rare instance when they do exist. They want immediate results and hence focus on tangible development rather than softer interventions. Hence, development budgets are essentially determined by political priorities – be it recruiting 80,000 teachers or creating 2 million jobs. These priorities, regardless of whether they help achieve broader development goals or not, are met to gain political mileage. Subsequently, policy clarity is undermined as politicians end up battling with bureaucrats for space in the service delivery domain.

Overestimation of fiscal space

Pakistan does not practice aggregate fiscal discipline as its annual expenditures are seldom aligned to its revenues. Provinces forecast spending on the basis of projected revenue transfers from the federal government, which typically overestimates tax collection. Spending decisions are thus based on a fictitious number. This reduces the predictability of the budget, and leads to re-prioritisation which is both expensive and disruptive. Release of adequate funds becomes a concern and most often impacts development expenditures. Funds allocated towards infrastructure projects – the more visible and politically salient investments – are disbursed swiftly while softer interventions are put on the back-burner. There is little learning within the system and provinces continue to witness an annual budget shortfall year after year. The fiscal space for development thus keeps reducing.

What next?

The underlying mantra for improving financial planning is that it must be embedded in an understanding of the government’s key policies, priorities and capacity to deliver. It must also be forward looking and pre-emptive.

In the case of Pakistan, budgetary decisions are not informed by any sound analysis or sectoral view. Parliamentary debates on the budget turn into political tussles and seldom focus on the rationale behind stated allocations. The budget document itself is full of complex jargon, rendering it incomprehensible for parliamentarians. Moving forward, Pakistan can draw lessons from Korea, which has set up a national assembly budget office consisting of a team of chartered accountants, lawyers and economists to continuously inform parliament’s debate on the budget.

The new government appears fully empowered to take on the required restructuring of the budget by strengthening line departments that have typically left the responsibility of public financial management to the finance department. Line department must play a central role in providing direction to financial plans and setting milestones. These departments are also well placed to decide on the most efficient way to achieve these milestone, given limited capacity and resources.

Despite the fact that the new government has inherited a difficult fiscal situation, the solution does not lie in simply reducing expenditure but in fact in enhancing it at the right place. Government can and should focus on both improving public financial management practices at all tiers, and rationalising recurrent expenses without compromising drastically on development allocations.

Hina Shaikh is the Country Economist at the International Growth Centre (IGC).

Anti-corruption rhetoric was the central plank of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) identity while it was in the opposition. Its leaders regularly described corruption in moral terms. Naeem-ul-Haque, a Special Assistant to the Prime Minister, for instance, exemplified this starkly, when he called the elections “A contest between the forces of good and evil.” Such language suggests that anti-corruption drives are about rooting out immoral individuals from an otherwise neutral system. As the party completes its transition from boisterous opposition to running the country’s administration, it must evolve a more nuanced approach towards tackling corruption. 

The idea that anti-corruption needs to be focused on bringing back stolen money may have energised the PTI base, but it is limited in scope. In its controversial verdict in the 2010 Citizens United case, the American Supreme Court described corruption, in that country’s legal sense, as bribery, and bribery as a narrow quid pro quo transaction. Courts must define corruption this narrowly because, in criminal cases, they must be convinced beyond doubt of a defendant’s guilt.

Yet corruption doesn’t always work in a narrow transactional way. Favours to the detriment of public interest are often bestowed in a loose system of barter. Influence is cultivated without specific or immediate needs, only to be harvested years later. And since corruption is conducted secretively, even when it involves narrow transactions, we will often fail to detect and prove it.

Jurists approach anti-corruption retrospectively and leave too many cases unchallenged. Policymakers must, in contrast, take a prospective approach, and ask how they can create an environment in the future that will make corruption less appealing across the board. To do this, policymakers must understand that people aren’t always inherently good or bad; they respond to incentives. An excellent example of this are diplomats posted at the UN headquarters in New York. At times when traffic laws were not enforced due to diplomatic immunity, even diplomats from the most law-abiding countries started breaking the law. When New York later found a loophole and started enforcing rules, even diplomats from corrupt countries – including Pakistanis – stopped breaking rules. The Urdu colloquialism that has ended countless drawing room debates, ‘Yeh qaum nahin sudhar sakti,’ (this nation cannot be set right), is simply untrue.

Once we accept that incentives and not personalities are the principal determinant of corruption, we must ask what creates opportunities for different types of corruption. Corruption can be divided into petty corruption, which is bribery, or theft of public resources conducted at the level of an individual or an office; and grand corruption, which is conducted on a larger scale, necessitating the cooperation and protection of senior politicians and bureaucrats, such as in the unchecked collection of protection money, or bhatta, in Karachi.

Petty corruption is the consequence of specific organisational choices and can be reduced through a change of procedures and rules. The government should consider four principles to reduce petty corruption.

It must conduct audits and regularly pick public servants at random, for wealth audits. It must also conduct surprise inspections and send undercover inspectors to audit offices. Proactive monitoring is important because citizens often fail to report corruption, either because they are colluding with the corrupt (such as when they pay bribes to decrease property tax calculations), or because they don’t expect complaints to lead to action. Auditing can be tricky, because auditors themselves can have incredibly high incentives to accept bribes. Their work must be cross-checked by independent sources, and both rewards and punishments amplified for their actions. 

Corruption unearthed in audits needs to be punished. Our system makes it too hard to fire non-performing bureaucrats, and this needs legislative reform. In the meanwhile, recent research shows that merit-based transfers improve bureaucratic incentives significantly in Pakistan.

Bottlenecks in official procedures, where only specific offices or officers can move paperwork, must be reduced. Citizens should, wherever possible, be able to approach multiple independent avenues to get their work done. The less irreplaceable a corrupt official, the lower his or her capacity to charge a bribe. This explains why NADRA offices are often less corrupt than passport offices. While a passport office is assigned to a person based on their domicile, one can get a CNIC issued at any of NADRA’s many facilitation centers – a single centre is not as important to the process.

In some contexts, restricting service providers is unavoidable. For example, we can’t let just anyone issue a license, and so we can’t reduce the inherent propensity for bribery here. In such environments, the dreaded ‘agent’ often appears, ostensibly to facilitate the completion of paperwork, but in reality to channel bribes to officials while retaining plausible deniability. Indeed, research in India suggests that driving inspectors randomly fail applicants who don’t use an agent, regardless of their driving ability, thus forcing more people to apply through that channel. Short of banning agents, the best solution is to hold the office staff responsible during undercover inspections, for any bribes accepted by agents.

Discretion should, whenever possible, be avoided in public procurement and personnel hiring. The more specialised the goods or services procured, the fewer vendors can compete to provide it, and the fewer citizens will be aware whether the prices charged are too high. This increases the risk of collusion between procurer and vendor. Similarly, bureaucrats around the world have been caught auctioning jobs that they are authorised to fill. This is a hard problem to tackle, because discretion and authority can be necessary for a government’s efficient functioning. Perhaps our best defense is to escalate the frequency of audits for senior officials, especially those who deal with postings and procurement.

The above proposals provide an accountability-based approach to anti-corruption. Creating an honest culture and providing personnel with a respectable life can also do wonders. Our best example of this comes from the Motorway Police, oft-cited as one of Pakistan’s least corrupt organisations. This force was constituted of personnel deputed by provincial police forces, which were notoriously corrupt. However, since they were well-paid, made to feel part of a team and monitored by an effective and honest leadership, they transformed. Corruption isn’t necessarily an immutable part of people’s identities: we just have to fix incentives and circumstances.

As anti-corruption efforts are embarked upon, there will be resistance. This has to be predicted and either defanged or borne. Corruption has concentrated beneficiaries and dilutes its burden over a large victim class. Thus, resistance to reform is, typically, fiercer than support. To find the path of least resistance, the government must understand that there are gradations of corruption: when citizens pay bribes, they are either being opportunistic, or forced into a corner. An honest owner of a firm might feel compelled to evade taxes if his competitors are doing so. Someone who has stood in line at the passport office for six hours might feel compelled to pay an agent with repugnance. Such individuals are the least culpable, and will resist change the least. 

Those who are part of the class of bribe-takers, such as agents, should be issued warnings and punished gradually. He who is the latest in a long line of agents hasn’t failed society as much as society has failed him. He is set in his ways, but needs time to turn his life around. Finally, no leniency must be showed to those whose corruption clearly emanates from greed. If the previous categories are well-dealt with, this final class can be relatively isolated.

In contrast to the relatively tractable problem of petty corruption, grand corruption, or corruption shielded from action by a political elite, will be harder to solve for the PTI government, given its well-known internal contradictions. The prime minister will have to walk a tight-rope between delivering on anti-corruption for his rank-and-file supporter, many of whom see justice as the party’s raison d’etre, and the electables who carried him to office, who are often beneficiaries of the status quo.

One solution would be for the government to consider a high-profile national initiative that will be hard for individual electables to resist. For example, it can replicate Brazil’s successful Federal Audit program. That country regularly conducts a monthly public lottery, attended by the press, politicians, and civil society. Sixty municipalities – roughly the size of our tehsils – are selected per lottery. A team of highly skilled and highly paid federal auditors are then sent to the municipalities to examine accounts and documents and collect citizen complaints, in a ten-day audit. A report is prepared and submitted to federal and local legislators, and made public. This system has led to citizens rewarding cleaner politicians and punishing the more corrupt ones in subsequent elections.

It is critical here that the entire process be seen as fair, targeting ruling party constituencies as frequently as constituencies won by other parties. The prime minister has talked a good game, claiming that accountability will begin with him, but actions need to match words. Equal treatment will ensure that politicians proven to be corrupt cannot allege political victimisation, or at least ensure that any such allegations don’t gain traction.

Any such audits will have to circumnavigate the problems that have befallen our investigative agencies in the past. First, the Musharraf dictatorship famously balked when the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) opened cases that were politically inexpedient. How the prime minister responds when faced with such a situation, may come to define his administration. As described above, auditors have incredibly high incentives to become corrupt themselves. One only has to leaf through the list of National Reconciliation Order (NRO) beneficiaries to learn that the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) – to name just one premier institution – has a history of politicised and compromised officers. If anti-corruption is to be successful, it must be done by clean investigation agencies, and this is where the prime minister must start.

While highly attractive, programmes like the audit system described above can be rolled back through an executive order by a successor government as easily as they are enacted. Work must be done on longer-term social processes as well, such as creating citizen awareness. One way to do this is to bolster the Right to Information (RTI) system, which allows citizens to request copies of government documents. RTI was nominally created many years ago, but has been allowed to remain dysfunctional in practice. Delivering transparency, and habituating citizens and reporters to rely on RTI can create a cultural shift that will be harder to roll back, similar to the difficulty now being faced in rolling back press freedom.

Finally, anti-corruption must be recognised as only one element in establishing the rule of law. We need to protect life and establish a robust writ, create sound property rights and enforce contracts better. Much of this rests with judicial reform, for which the prime minister can only facilitate the actions of the judiciary, but not lead the charge.

It will require decades of struggle to create well-governed institutions. That struggle will be carried out by an informed people when enough of us consider corruption as an existential crisis. The new prime minister can play an important role in this journey, but we as citizens should remember that the buck stops firmly with us.

Dr. Ali Hasanain is a CDPR Fellow.

This article was first published in Newsline Magazine here.

Well into its second ever democratic transfer of power, and facing a looming balance of payments crisis just two years after the completion of a USD 6.6 billion IMF program, it is still uncertain whether Pakistan will seek another IMF loan to meet high-pressure external financing needs. The Economic Advisory Council suggested last week that the government must be prepared to take some tough economic decisions. It is not clear if these decisions include opting for another bailout. Given the health of the external sector, several experts believe that not going to the IMF may be far more economically and politically riskier than any alternative. The range of other options available will each have to be timed, pursued and implemented immaculately to cover the financing gap – a move which may not be realistic even if is probable.

The Economic landscape – The facts

The on-going balance of payments crisis has its roots in the current account deficit that quadrupled in the past two years touching USD 18 billion by the end FY18, up by 42.5 percent over the previous fiscal year. The State Bank of Pakistan has just around USD 10 billion worth of foreign exchange reserves – barely enough to fund imports for more than two months. Pakistan’s overall trade deficit in FY18 stood at USD 37.7 billion with imports standing at a record USD 60.9 billion. Government’s budget deficit is also well over 7 percent of its GDP. Foreign direct investment has only marginally improved since FY15, when it hit a record low. Pakistan will not be able to sustain its current growth at 5.8 percent for much longer.

Senior economists have estimated an external financing requirement of 26 bn for Pakistan which compares well with the IMF estimates of USD 27 bn and the Ministry of Finance’s calculation of USD 23 bn. According to a report by the interim Finance Minister, Pakistan would require USD 9.3 bn to meet its debt-related obligations in FY19 that includes repayments to the IMF[1].

Understanding the causes

The fiscal irresponsibility demonstrated by the previous government must be understood and acknowledged as a major contributor to Pakistan’s current financial crisis. To state simply, the government spent more than it collected. It incurred enormous expenditures in the form of large investments in infrastructure, energy, CPEC-related projects without increasing the revenue inflow. Secondly, it continued to import far more than it exported while export-led industrialization was pushed to the back-burner.

When governments are faced with a fiscal crisis they usually have three main levers to push the economy back on its feet. The first is to devalue the currency as an effective fall in the exchange rates can help the economy become more competitive. The State Bank has already devalued the rupee four times since December 2017 thus further devaluation may not be an option.

The second option is to curtail public expenditure under a tight fiscal policy. With a limited fiscal space, this can be done by managing demand – placing cuts in development spending, placing more taxes and reducing reliance on imports. Regardless of an IMF bailout, Pakistan will seriously need to slash down government expenditure.

The third option is to draw on temporary funds to help address immediate liquidity shortages and financing gaps. This is usually a last resort and works best as a means to give the country more time to deal with the deficit while making room for it to address the structural deficiencies. In the case of Pakistan, this option would most likely manifest itself as yet another IMF loan.

What will an IMF bailout look like?

Although IMF has not made any promise to bail out Pakistan, nor has Pakistan formally asked for one, the finance minister has clearly stated that if Pakistan does decide to go to the IMF, it will not be the first but the thirteenth time it will be doing so[2]. Experts anticipate a final word on it by end of this year. Pakistan may seek USD 10 to 15 billion in what could be its largest IMF package till date[3].

An adverse reaction from the US, IMF’s biggest shareholder, can complicate and extend negotiations. The US has clearly urged IMF not to promise any funding to Pakistan until it publishes full details of the loans it has taken from China to pay for CPEC. Currently the net transfers (i.e. disbursement minus debt-servicing) from China are positive. Re-payments don’t feature in the current financing gap. Thus the fear that IMF support will be used to bail out Chinese bondholders is unfounded.

Any successful IMF program requires government’s commitment to the policies outlined in the program. While the IMF is unlikely to refuse funding to any country its assistance will come with the standard neoliberal policy conditions that will include further devaluation of the rupee, privatisation of loss-making state owned enterprises, a rise in power tariffs and reduction in subsidies on agriculture. Associated with a new potential loan will also be extensive pressure to reduce aggregate demand of which the largest burden will be on the fiscal side. This will be critical for reducing the deficit from 7 to 5 percent of the GDP in the first year.

This could hamper Khan’s efforts to substantially enhance public spending and also hit economic growth. The last time Pakistan entered the IMF program, growth rate stood at under four percent. This poses a challenge to the new government, voted in with high expectations to set up an Islamic welfare state. As part of PTI’s 100-day agenda, its electorate will expect initiatives for social uplift and job creation. The PTI has promised to create 10 million jobs and build five million low-cost housing units in the next five years.

Exploring alternatives

While steps have been taken, such as multiple currency adjustments, to address economic imbalances, avoiding an imminent default on international payments requires much more. Going to the IMF will most likely lead to the imposition of inflexible and untimely policies for the new government, thus it is actively considering several alternatives. However, none of these options are sufficient to meet the financing needs on their own.

Government is considering placing regulatory duty on or curtailing certain imports to reduce the financing gap. However only imports from formal channels can be taxed. Most luxury goods are under-invoiced or smuggled so unless their true value is declared the benefits of such a scheme will be limited and this may encourage further under-invoicing.

Relying on the goodwill of some countries – Saudi Arabia’s help in deferring oil payments and rescheduling of some of the repayments under CPEC – can ease off some of the pressure. Other fiscal measures to reduce public expenditure, manage demand and control capital may help.

Government also plans to launch investment (Sukuk) bonds for overseas Pakistanis. This would be similar to the Central Directorate of National Savings (CDNS) – a dollar-denominated bond. However, borrowing from the capital market may be restricted following Pakistan’s altered credit ratings from stable to negative.

The government has also promised a massive privatisation drive by making a special wealth fund where all SOEs will be transferred to obtain necessary funds that may help with IMF negotiations for a more favourable deal.

Possibility of bilateral financial assistance also expands Pakistan’s menu of choices. China has assured Pakistan it can be counted on and its funding would not come with IMF-like conditions. However, Pakistan is becoming increasingly dependent on external financing from China’s state-backed banks since the last financial year, having secured loans worth more than USD 5 billion. It already lent Pakistan USD 2 billion in June this year – just ahead of the elections to boost its foreign reserves, and further loans from China will significantly add to a higher debt burden. In early August, Saudi-backed Islamic Development Bank (IDB) also agreed in principle to lend Pakistan more than USD 4 bn. Borrowing from friendly countries provides a low quantum at a much higher interest compared to IMF.

Sustaining growth – a long-term view

Whether we seek another IMF loan or not, the critical question to ask is if our government has a home-grown plan to make the economy stand on its own feet. A bailout will only provide breathing space and postpone the current fiscal crisis. Policymakers will have to take concrete measures to address the underlying causes of macroeconomic crises that repeats itself every few years.

The fundamental imbalances stem from a disparity between public sector spending and income, and an underdeveloped export base. An IMF loan will not address these structural shortcomings nor will it re-distribute the means of production to fix this. The sooner this is realised the better it will be for generating a plan for stable, inclusive and sustainable economic growth.

At the same time the government should also think through the design and associated conditionality of any stabilisation program. The conditions should not only be realistic but also speak to the structural deficiencies. Revenue inflow must be expanded by enhancing the tax base rather than tax rates. Subsidies should be targeted instead of being removed altogether. Privatisation of state-run-enterprises while necessary should be planned with a longer time horizon. At the same time a fundamental revisiting of the public policy and business environment is needed to encourage exports. Reforms also need to be introduced to leverage the potential of its youth and the private sector. Any further stalemate in policy direction to address these structural concerns will only lead to more macroeconomic instability in the future.

Hina Shaikh is the Country Economist at the International Growth Centre (IGC).

[1] “Stabilisation and economic growth policy recommendation paper”, prepared by the former interim finance minister Dr Shamshad Akhtar-led finance ministry.

[2] Technically it would be the seventh time excluding individual loans that were often combined or led to larger programme loans.

[3] 7.6 billion in 2008 is the largest IMF bailout package

With Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) winning six out of twelve national assembly seats, the 2018 general elections mark the first time since the 2002 polls that any political party has won more seats in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), than independently-elected candidates. With a majority mandate in the area, and control of the federal government as well as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) provincial government, PTI is now promising a prioritization of FATA’s mainstreaming and merger with KP. To do so it has formed a high level committee for this very purpose. However, while the political mandate remains firmly in place, the difficulty of forming a blueprint for implementation of the merger is becoming clear as all previous reports have only left an extended wish list rather than a realistic plan of how this might be accomplished.

For starters, even now large segments of FATA still feel that they were not adequately consulted before the decision to merge their region with KP was taken. Many fear that they risk becoming a backwater territory of KP and might struggle to get their fair share in public funds. Being part of tribal society offered some advantages that many fear they stand to lose and are skeptical that the benefits of being part of the country’s mainstream setup would reach them any time soon. For example, locals are use to quick justice, very low crime rates compared to adjacent districts of KP, a social safety net system provided by the tribe, (and in some parts by the political administration), and in some manner a more egalitarian system. To create greater buy-in and to try and keep in place positives from the tribal system in place, as the region goes through this historic transition, it is imperative that the merger process and its planning be inclusive. With that in mind it doesn’t bode well that the newly formed committee to look at the merger of FATA, has no representation from FATA. This is especially worrying since the merger basically means rewriting the social contract between FATA residents and the state. Presumption of knowing better than the locals about what’s good for the people of the area on part of the ruling party may prove to be a costly misstep.

In terms of mainstreaming FATA, it is crucial for the government to strike the right balance between developing new institutional infrastructure and reconstruction of homes, basic necessities and other economic infrastructure. For example the Peshawar High Court has estimated that it would require a little under PKR 14 billion to construct judicial complexes in each agency at the district and tehsil level. To put this in context, last year FATA’s total annual development budget was about PKR 24 billion. To further elaborate what this amount means for FATA, consider the fact that the FATA Disaster Management Authority (FDMA) has estimated that over 80,000 homes have either been partially or completely damaged across FATA. According to the government’s policy PKR 160,000 is given to partially damaged homes and PKR 400,000 to completely damaged ones. Disregarding the fact that this amount isn’t even enough to remove the rubble left behind let alone reconstruct compounds housing multiple families, this means that even if each home was partially damaged, the government would need about PKR 13 billion to fund this program. However, so far the government has only been able to commit PKR 5 billion, which goes a long way in explaining its slow implementation.

Some mystifying and ill-thought out specifications for infrastructure development also help explain the large outlay required. For example, in Orakzai Agency where according to the most recent census in 2017, the population is about 250,000, the government is looking to acquire 100 acres of land for making the judicial complex. Why such a large chunk of flat land, in a mountainous area like Orakzai with such a scarce population is needed is incomprehensible. Even judicial complexes in major cities catering to millions of people are nowhere near this size. Similar decisions have been made in other parts of FATA as well.

Spending funds in the right place is one part of the equation, but the reality is that current fund levels in FATA are not enough to reconstruct and develop this war-torn region. Although the previous government of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) talked a lot about development funds for FATA, a concrete commitment was never actualized in the end. Initially it was suggested that FATA be given its share in the NFC award which would seem like the logical thing to do but with the provinces not being able to agree to where the share would come from, it was later decided to just earmark PKR 100 billion a year directly by the federal government. However, as mentioned earlier, that too hasn’t come to fruition either.

After a long time one political party i.e. PTI has formed the government at the center as well as in KP and Punjab and as a coalition partner in Balochistan. In Sindh the PPP remains a strong advocate for merging FATA and prioritizing its development needs. In this scenario there is no excuse why FATA won’t be able to get 3 percent in the NFC award for its development needs.

In conclusion, the government needs to be smart in the development decisions they make. For this it’s important for them to do the following:

i) Insure inclusivity and bring on board development and regional experts.

ii) Resist its impulse to acquire large pieces of real estate and develop colonial era   institutional compounds that are larger than most towns in FATA, all in the name of developing basic institutional infrastructure.

iii) Commit the funds needed by giving FATA its 3 percent share in the NFC award.

iv) Learn from global examples of leapfrogging stages of development through modern technology. For example, countries like Ghana, caught up with the rest of the world by developing cell phone infrastructure and through it promoted branchless banking directly rather than first developing expensive and outdated traditional phone lines and bank branches.

Ghazan Jamal is the In-country economist at the International Growth Centre (IGC).