“Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraq witnessed a major opening up of civic space,” the ICNL surmises, “as thousands of new Iraqi non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were established and registered.”
This was largely due to Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 45, issued by the interim Iraqi government then being run by American diplomat Paul Bremer. Order Number 45 was drafted because NGOs were seen as an important part of Iraq’s reconstruction strategy.
As a result, the number of NGOs in Iraq ballooned. Until early last year, there were between 6,000 and even 12,000 NGOs in Iraq. The ICNL reports that there are more than 6,000 NGOs in Iraq while the NGO Coordination Committee for Iraq (NCCI), a voluntary committee comprised of some of the most reputable NGOs in the country that aims to improve coordination between the different groups, wrote that “between 2003 and 2010, the number of Iraqi NGOs considerably increased and were estimated somewhere in the region of 8,000 to 12,000.”
But as locals will tell you, many of these NGOs were not really doing anything. Earlier this year Hemin Saleh, the head of an NGO based in the semi-autonomous state of Iraqi Kurdistan called Communication for Democracy and Human Rights, spoke about how a new law on NGOs in that state would affect ineffective organizations there. "Many NGOs are just places for drinking tea,” Saleh agreed. “They take some money from the government for rent and they use their office for relaxation.”
In a 2007 article Iraqi writer Haifa Zangana reported in Lebanon’s Al Akhbar newspaper that Babil’s state government had reported that out of 300 NGOs registered in that province, only 50 were really doing anything.
No official Iraqi government departments hold statistics on the number of bogus NGOs. However official statements on the topic can be found. In July 2009, Hussein al-Safi, the former head of the NGOs Department in the Secretariat of the Iraqi Cabinet, or Council of Ministers, said that 300 fake civil society organizations had been de-registered.
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