In Gabriel Garcea Marquez’s ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’, a whole town knows a man is going to be killed. Everyone sees the signs. No one acts. And yet, when it happens, they all pretend to be shocked. Something eerily similar has unfolded in Pakistan’s development landscape.
The donor has left the room – or has been packing up since 2020. And we’ve been pretending not to notice.
In 2025, after decades of development aid, democracy grants, gender equality funds and governance-strengthening missions, the global development architecture has crumbled under the weight of shifting geopolitics and regional priorities.
With the US folding up its civilian aid arm, USAID, and a Republican administration halting most foreign assistance, European donors, caught between economic slowdowns, refugee crises, climate catastrophes and war fatigue on the Eastern front, are slashing budgets across governance, gender, and institutional support. In the Middle East, destruction has refocused priorities towards immediate security and humanitarian responses. There is little appetite left for long-term democratic strengthening elsewhere.
Pakistan, for its part, remains suspended between crisis and recovery. It leans heavily on IMF lifelines while navigating fragile political transitions and sluggish economic restructuring. But what’s missing in most policy circles is a sober assessment of what this global aid drawdown means for us financially and structurally. Because, for all the pilots, projects and frameworks, development in Pakistan has also created a strange dependence: not just among communities, but among the very institutions meant to protect them. Worse still, it has quietly colonised not just systems – but minds and ideas.
Between 2010 and 2020, Pakistan received approximately $2.5 billion in USAID funding, covering healthcare, education, humanitarian assistance, infrastructure, and economic growth. In 2023, a five-year Development Objectives Assistance Agreement (DOAG) worth $445.6 million was signed to support climate-resilient growth and inclusive governance. Yet even this was a final flicker before the plug was pulled. We must finally admit: we were trained to look upward for support, not inward for reform.
Donor-funded projects have undeniably done good. Countless women were empowered, civil society multiplied, and parliament saw meaningful engagement on gender and development. I know this intimately. But I have also witnessed how, over time, development work became an ecosystem unto itself, operating in parallel to parliament and ministries, not embedded within them.
A project ends, a report is published and launched in the confines of fancy star-hotels and the cycle repeats. Take the case of human rights institutions in the country. These commissions now speak only the language of NGOs, engage exclusively with donors and remain alarmingly distant from the very communities they were meant to protect – reduced to projectised actors in a donor-scripted drama.
Government departments are no different – they have learned to speak in project language: logframes, indicators, and theories of change while forgetting how to speak to their own constituents. Aid money, often meant to build capacity, instead built a class of intermediaries: consultants, NGOs, and technical advisers (local and international), indispensable to state functioning but without institutional accountability. In many ministries, files simply did not move without donor-funded experts drafting them.
Meanwhile, communities were conditioned to expect project deliverables: material goods (like mobile phones or sanitation kits), small-scale subsidies, or one-off aid packages rather than sustainable skills or opportunities for long-term growth. These short-term interventions fostered dependence, rather than empowering individuals to drive their own development and demand systemic change from their elected representatives. We turned citizens into ‘beneficiaries’ and public institutions into project hosts. In this way, aid didn’t just underwrite development; it undermined democratic accountability.
Today, as donors exit and global priorities shift, Pakistan stands in the ruins of a partially constructed development state – one with aspirations, but without the fiscal independence or institutional muscle to realise them. But perhaps this reckoning is not a tragedy but an invitation. An invitation to reimagine development not as something delivered to us, but built by us. To shift from aid dependence to legislative and policy ownership. To acknowledge that lasting reform must be financed, demanded, and implemented locally, not subcontracted to international missions.
This moment demands new questions. What would it mean to localise development, not just geographically, but ideologically? Can our institutions reclaim policy spaces once ceded to external actors? Can civil society evolve from donor interlocutors into political actors engaging citizens and public systems directly? More importantly, can we decolonise the very way we think about change and reform?
For too long, external aid defined our development trajectory. It shaped our laws, our institutions, even our rhetoric. But true sovereignty – economic, political, intellectual – requires that we generate, fund and govern our own progress. Not by replicating donor models, but by daring to imagine our own.
If Pakistan is to chart a new course, we must begin with two acknowledgements: first, that the donor era as we knew it is over. And second, that no one is coming to save us. Our reforms, our rights, our institutions - they will be only what we choose to make of them. Development must not disappear, but it must be reborn.
Let us not wait, like Marquez’s townspeople, for the death to become official before we mourn what’s lost or worse, pretend we didn’t know. The signs have long been there. The donor is leaving. The question now is: will we finally step into the space they occupied? Or will we keep looking at the door, hoping they turn back?
The writer is a former adviser to the United Nations. He tweets Hassanhakeem87