Where Did the Money Go? WWF-Pakistan and the Accountability It Has Avoided

I write this with a heavy heart, as a citizen and not as an enemy of conservation. Pakistan needs strong environmental institutions, and that is exactly why the silence around WWF-Pakistan’s performance has become unbearable. Donors open their wallets in the name of 260 million Pakistanis, yet how many of those people can say what WWF-Pakistan has delivered for them?

Begin with the watershed of Khanpur Dam, a principal source of drinking water for Islamabad and Rawalpindi. WWF-Pakistan began its work in the Hazara waterfalls area of the Jabri valley. In this catchment, a failure of stewardship can turn into a municipal tap failure within a decade. WWF’s own global research, Running Pure, produced with the World Bank/WWF Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use, argues that protected areas are vital to keeping clean water flowing to major cities. As I understand WWF’s global position, the lesson of that work is plain: keep infrastructure and pollution sources out of the watersheds that supply cities with drinking water. Protect the catchment, keep it clean and keep it quiet.

Now look at what WWF-Pakistan did in Pakistan’s own capital region. By the figure I have been given, it spent some USD 5 million on a walking track and a tourist hut at Khanpur Dam, structures that invite visitors, litter, waste and sewage into the very catchment that supplies the drinking water of millions. The global organisation preaches removal of infrastructure and pollution from city watersheds, while its Pakistan office builds infrastructure and a standing source of pollution inside one. What explanation can there be for this? Was there an environmental impact assessment, and who reviewed it? Who approved it, and was WWF’s own global guidance consulted or ignored? What heinous crime against the people of Islamabad and Rawalpindi was committed in the name of conservation, and who answers for it? Five million dollars is not a rounding error. Spent on a hut and a footpath, it is an insult to a water-stressed country.

This is not an isolated case. Consider the flagship project, Recharge Pakistan, a USD 72.8 million, seven-year partnership among the Ministry of Climate Change, the Federal Flood Commission, the Green Climate Fund and WWF-Pakistan. It promises Nature-based Solutions to build climate resilience in the Indus Basin, to benefit more than 680,000 people and to restore over 14,215 hectares of degraded wetlands and forests. Those are impressive numbers, but a target is not a result. Which wetlands, exactly, and in what condition were they before? How many hectares are verifiably restored today, and who independently verified it? How many of the 680,000 beneficiaries can be named, located and shown to be safer from the next flood? Beneficiary counts are often the softest numbers in any development report, because they can be inflated by counting everyone who happens to live within a project’s reach.

The same pattern runs through the rest of the portfolio: Water Resilient Architecture for Pakistan, the Regenerative Production Landscape Collaborative, climate-smart cotton for 100,000 farmers, mangrove management in the Indus Delta, coastal clean-ups with corporate sponsors, Nature Clubs for Youth and the Sustainable Infrastructure Initiative in Gilgit. Every one has a worthy name, and every one is described in the language of enabling, equipping, strengthening and promoting. These are verbs of activity, not of outcome. A workshop is not a watershed, a training session is not a recharged aquifer and a launch ceremony is not a flood avoided. A reader of these reports could be forgiven for thinking the real product is the report itself.

Pakistan’s water crisis is not mysterious. Groundwater is falling, aquifers are being mined faster than they refill, and floodwater races to the sea instead of being captured. The engineering response is established science: delay-action dams, check dams, recharge ponds and watershed structures that slow the water and push it underground. Balochistan, Sindh and southern Punjab need such structures desperately. Set USD 72.8 million against that need and ask how many physical structures, storing how many cubic metres, the public can point to. When a dam is built, you can stand on it, measure its reservoir and watch the wells recover. When a capacity-building framework is delivered, you can only read about it. Donors fund the second, and the people of Pakistan never get the first.

Why does this persist? Because Pakistan has no serious tradition of performance audits for foreign-funded and local NGOs. Financial audits tell us whether receipts match expenditures; they do not tell us whether the money produced anything. Neighbouring countries scrutinise foreign-funded organisations far more closely. India has its foreign contribution regulations and Bangladesh has its NGO Affairs Bureau. Whatever one thinks of those systems, they assert a principle that Pakistan has never insisted on: every dollar given in a nation’s name is subject to that nation’s questions. The Auditor General, the Economic Affairs Division and the accountability agencies NAB or FIA have shown no appetite for asking an NGO what it achieved with a donor’s dollar. The result is a system in which reports are written by the organisation, evaluated by consultants it hires and celebrated at events it hosts. Success is whatever the next press release says it is.

Then there is the question of leadership. WWF-Pakistan has been led for twelve years by the same chief executive and director general. Long tenure is not a crime, and continuity can be valuable. But in an organisation that raises money in the name of the public, twelve years at the top without visible succession planning, term limits or independent performance review should alarm everyone. It is a familiar pattern in development circles, known as elite capture: institutions built to serve the public slowly become instruments of the small circle that runs them. Relationships with ministries, embassies and corporate sponsors become the real asset, and the skill most rewarded is the skill of staying in the room. When the one constant is the leader’s longevity and the least visible thing is measurable impact, the public is entitled to ask whether the institution serves its mission or its incumbents. I would also ask how much of the leadership’s time is spent in Pakistan’s watersheds and how much in the conference halls of the world, and what the country has to show for the difference.

The remedies are not complicated. Every donor-funded WWF-Pakistan project above one million dollars should face an independent performance audit by evaluators neither chosen nor paid by WWF, with the results published in full. Recharge Pakistan must publish its baselines and its verified outcomes: hectares restored, structures built, groundwater recharged, beneficiaries counted and the method used to count them. The Khanpur work, the track, the hut, the cost and the decision trail, must be explained to the public in full. WWF-Pakistan must disclose what share of each donor dollar reaches the ground and what share goes to salaries, travel, consultants and administration. And its board must introduce fixed terms, open recruitment and a genuine, independent review of executive performance.

If Pakistan’s institutions will not ask these questions, others can. The Economic Affairs Division, the Auditor General and the parliamentary committees on climate change have every authority to demand answers, and I urge them to use it. But I have no illusion that they will act. I therefore turn to the donors, the Green Climate Fund, the corporate partners and the foundations that gave generously in the name of Pakistan’s people. They gave this money to protect a country’s water, forests and farmers, not to underwrite a hut on a drinking-water catchment. Ask to see the dam, the pond, the restored wetland and the recharged well. Ask to speak to the farmer who benefited, not the consultant who wrote about her.

This is not an argument against conservation; it is an argument for it. Every rupee spent on a structure that pollutes a city’s water, or on a report no one can verify, is a rupee taken from a real watershed and a real village. I will not let this matter end as one more article that fades by the weekend. I will carry this case to WWF’s global leadership and to every donor that has funded WWF-Pakistan, with the documents, the questions and the demand for full accountability. Any funds found wasted or misused in the name of the people of Pakistan must be recovered and returned to the cause they were given for. Pakistan has given the world’s donors its trust. It is time that trust was met with evidence, and where there is none, with restitution