Philanthropy and charity need to be channelised

Islamabad : The state of health and education in Pakistan is in silent emergency, as maternal mortality rate, malnourishment, illiteracy and quality of education is getting deteriorate every day mainly due to lack of investments and little attention. Pakistan needs to project silent emergency in health and education to help channelize the philanthropy, charities and other forms of giving in these sectors.

This was crux of the thoughts shared by experts during a seminar titled ‘Pakistani diaspora philanthropy: Patterns and motivations of giving of Pakistani diaspora in UK,’ organised by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in collaboration with the Pakistan Center for Philanthropy (PCP) here.

Naseemur Rehman, the prime minister's focal person on shelter homes project, said that Pakistanis by nature are very emotional and less logical when it comes to giving charity and doing philanthropic activities.

He said in major emergencies, such as earthquake of 2005, Pakistanis reacted very emotionally and sent lots of charity, which was even difficult to handle.

"We failed to project the silent emergency in illiteracy and maternal mortality, which is why these areas are the least focus of foreign assistance as well," he said.

Naseem pointed out that Pakistan has very week grounds on Human Development Index (HDI), as we invest very little on HDI indicators, which led to putting the country on the bottom of the index.

He said with poor HDI indicators and little focus on human development no one will trust and ready to invest on people of Pakistan.