When compliance isn’t enough: Mansoor Ahmed on governance’s role in building a culture of accountability
Mansoor Ahmed is wary of evidence gathered for its own sake: complaint boxes ticked off, feedback collected but never acted on. On why accountability is a habit rather than a document.
For Mansoor Ahmed, Executive Director of Pakistan’s Fast Rural Development Program (FRDP) and a new member of the CHS Alliance Board, governance is the essence of what it means to be held to account. “When we talk about accountability,” he says, “the basic is we should have good governance.”
Drawing on decades of humanitarian work across Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, Mansoor describes good governance as transparent planning, communication, participation, careful stewardship of resources, and a genuine reckoning with whether an organisation’s work is reaching the people it’s meant to serve — “not only… to our donors and authorities… but also to the people to whom we serve.”
That distinction — between accountability as a reporting exercise and accountability as lived practice — runs through Mansoor’s leadership approach. He’s wary of what he calls evidence for evidence’s sake: complaint boxes ticked off, photos filed, feedback collected but never acted on. “Are we really incorporating those learnings… to improve our work?” he asks. “Or is it just for the sake of saying, okay, we are doing a complaint and feedback process?”
He offers a small, telling example. A recent internal decision at his organisation was, on paper, entirely compliant — but it didn’t sit right with him once he considered how it would land for the people it involved. Ahmed pushed back, not because a rule had been broken, but because compliant and fair aren’t always the same thing. It’s the kind of everyday judgement call, he argues, that determines whether an organisation’s values are real or just on paper.
Mansoor’s biggest ask of the sector echoes that same idea, scaled up. Too often, he says, accountability gets reduced to compliance: gathering paperwork to prove a box has been ticked, rather than embedding accountability into how an organisation actually operates, at every level, in every decision. This, for Mansoor, is exactly what the Core Humanitarian Standard asks of organisations — not a compliance checklist, but a practical, lived commitment, whether an organisation is local or global. “We should make it part of our organisational culture,” he says, “instead of looking for evidence for compliance.”
It’s a reminder that accountability isn’t a document. It’s a habit.