It was an admittedly lazy categorisation that social sector beat reporters used to have amongst themselves: if “awareness” is all that an NGO does, then chances are that it fits perfectly in the unfortunate NGO stereotype of a gravy train that doesn’t do much.
Don’t get me wrong. I know spreading awareness is serious business; not taking anything away from that. There’s certainly a need for awareness campaigns in certain areas and some would actually be doing great work to that end. But for organisations looking for an easy meal ticket, there really isn’t a better proposition than the awareness and advocacy rackets.
Because, though NGOs building or running schools, hospitals or microfinance organisations might also be keeping overheads high (at best) or stealing from the till (at worst) there is still something that they would have to show for themselves at the end of the day. In awareness campaigns, on the other hand, there is little by way of gauging an honest day’s work.
So lax are the standards in this area, and so limited is the oversight, that organisations that might actually want to do good work end up leaving serious-minded independent observers scratching their heads.
A good example of an organisation that might have its heart at the right place but is seemingly being run without adult supervision is the DFID-funded Alif Ailaan. Describing itself as “a campaign that seeks to put education at the front and centre of public discourse in Pakistan,” the organisation has been around for a couple of years and is, as promised, good at getting press. After all, it says that it is run “by a small team of media and strategic communications specialists with experience from across the world.”
The organisation is generally thought of as one fighting the good fight. After all, the education sector in the country needs all the friends it can get. And it seems to be much celebrated in local development circles. But a recent cogently written article by Islamabad-based researcher Muhammad Saleem for The News on Sunday implied that the emperor might not be as adequately clothed as previously thought.
And the thrust of the article was not a minor nitpicking here or there about some aspects of methodology. What the article was too polite to suggest directly was that, in some cases, the organisation was doing the exact opposite of what it claimed it to do.
See, Alif Ailaan says its mission is to bring education to the forefront of political debate in the country. The idea, they keep saying, is for political parties to take ownership of education and for there to be a competition between them over education stats. Fair enough.
But have a look at what they did in their 2015 annual report, for example. According to the report, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s education score rose by 13.15pc in one year, while Punjab’s score fell by 3.38pc. In the healthy competition between political parties that Alif Ailaan wanted, the PTI seemed to have “won” that year. And, as was expected, the PTI’s media teams milked this for political mileage. It was a talking point for the PTI on several talk shows and newspaper columns. On the social media, it was shared by the party chairman and education minister’s official accounts.
So, what’s wrong with that, you ask. Well, tucked away in the research methodology section of the report titled Alif Ailaan 2015 Annual District Education Rankings Report was the fact that the majority of the indicators were from data that was two years old; reporting the increase from 2012 to 2013. The casual reader didn’t bother to look at that and credited the ANP government’s achievement to the PTI. As Muhammad Saleem notes, “while Alif Ailaan reports did mention this limitation of the data in its methodology section but tables/graphs/figures in the reports were titled with the year of publication of Alif Ailaan reports. This is against the international convention of data presentations in reports.”
Being media professionals they would know how a report titled “2015” would have read. In the interests of the truth, they could have cleared up the confusion but the Alif Ailaan official twitter account also retweeted the PTI’s self-congratulatory tweets. Retweets, in this context, certainly are an endorsement.
I generally use Hanlon’s razor and would conclude to say that Alif Ailaan hadn’t thought it through. That it was incompetence, rather than mala fide. It would be difficult, however, for the ANP activists to be so understanding.
Moving on to another issue. Why did they choose to give out report cards to MNAs? Under our constitution, MNAs are only supposed to legislate, not be responsible for the state of education in their constituencies. The provincial education minister could be held accountable, the district nazim could be held accountable, but by no way would the MNA be accountable. Yes, the MNAs could take their concerns about the state of education in their respective constituencies to parliament, but it still won’t necessarily change the situation on the ground, specially if they’re opposition members. To hold, say, Imran Khan, the representative for Rawalpindi NA-56, accountable for the state of education in that constituency would be silly. In a political culture already deformed by recurrent military interruptions, the general public has to be constantly reminded not to confuse legislators with executives. This report card for MNAs furthers that confusion.
Then, there are the other, technical issues. For instance, if informed public debate is the ultimate goal, then their composite indices aren’t as informative as they should be. A lot of rich, statistical information dissipates into the ether because of the desire to aggregate information. Easy-to-digest single figures, rather than richer, only slightly more complicated set of variables. As Einstein said, things should be kept as simple as possible, but not any simpler.
Given the gravity of the other, earlier mentioned errors, this seems like nitpicking. But is it?
The problem: education is serious business. It needs serious-minded people to think about it and talk about it. Advocacy groups might say that their job is not to do research, but to disseminate research and stir debate. Well, even for that, one needs a level of understanding of the issues at hand.
Media NGOs in general need to up their game. Being good at communication, being able to get buzz, being able to write concise, crisp prose, commissioning smart graphic designs and layouts, all of these amount to nothing if you’re not clear about what you’re communicating in the first place.
This lack of robustness that communication NGOs show is even more pronounced in the media itself. In fact, we’re seeing it right now, in the coverage of the budget. The anchors, all of them “communicators”, who have a “way with words” and few of them thinking men and women, lay on thick populism and parry away complexity.