Walk into any climate conference in Karachi and you will meet founders. Each leads an NGO with a name, a logo and a social media page. What is harder to find is the crowd behind them. Over the years I have come to suspect that many of our environmental groups are not movements but individuals, and that their apparent size has more to do with the last grant than with any lasting community support.

An NGO is known almost entirely by its founder's face. Then funding arrives, and suddenly there are coordinators, project officers, consultants and a team photograph. The workforce looks impressive, but it was assembled by a budget line. When the project closes, the team thins out, and the founder is once again the outfit. This is the difference between a body with a volunteer base and one with a payroll. Volunteers stay when there is no money. Employees, quite reasonably, do not.

Language has become part of the problem. People recruited for an event, handed a T-shirt and paid a daily wage or an incentive are often described in reports as volunteers. They are not. Someone who performs an assigned task for payment is an event worker, and there is nothing shameful in that; honest work deserves honest pay. The problem lies in the label, which borrows the moral credit of volunteerism while hiding the transaction.

Why is real volunteering so thin in Pakistan? Part of the answer is structural. Political parties offer........

© The Express Tribune