Who is gaining more in the battle of development?

Who is gaining more in the battle of development?

In the name of development funds, aid, help and ‘doing good’ churns the wheel of many businesses which we term as Nongovernmental Organistions. There are now zillions of them operating in the name of ‘helping and developing’. The curse obviously falls upon the third world countries which are already known for being deprived  and to make matters worse these very countries are convinced that they are being ‘developed’ by the NGOs to come at par with the developed world.

It is a highly controversial yet quite straight forward issue to see that who gets to benefit more, the ones who claim to provide assistance or those who are being offered the ‘assistance’.  Under developed and developing countries at one end are a hub of disasters, natural or manmade, topped with an abundance of natural mostly non-renewable resources that have not been exploited yet obviously due to the lack of ‘expertise and resources’ that all of a sudden mercifully are presented by the world super powers.

A small chip from the review of John Perkins ‘Confession of an Economic Hit Man’ says:

Developemental works like power projects, electrification etc would then be contracted to American companies most notably Bechtel, Haliburton etc. These projects would ensure that the loans granted would be immediately ploughed back into American companies. As time goes by the growth projections (sometimes as high as 20%) would not be achieved in a sustained fashion and the countries would bear high interest burden for the loan repayments (sometimes as high as 50% of national budgets).

The ‘loan’ that is mentioned above is the help that the poor countries are enticed into for progressing and developing like the rest. Every dimension of all these projects from getting the construction machines to the human resource goes in the benefit of those claiming to ‘help’.

Pakistan is an instrumental example to illustrate how so many NGOs are no longer only getting sponsored by other businesses but have become a business themselves. The earthquakes and floods have fueled the injection of such ‘help’ into the economy which is proving to be very helpful for all those who do not need it and never have to pay back what comes as strings attached in the form of sand pit of interest recoveries.

It is late but still not too late to realize where the pit hole is leading and how soon the doors to way out of it will close or…………. are they already closed?

Posted by Anita Khalid on Oct 17 2011. Filed under Editorial, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry