Foreign Training of Government Officers and Public Sector Capacity in Pakistan

Shortage of qualified human resource is a major impediment to improve the overall organisational performance. Training is considered as a key instrument to enhance employee’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. Despite several initiatives to improve the public sector performance in Pakistan, benefits of foreign trainings of government officers are largely contested. This paper explores how the Pakistan government responds to capacity constraints and to what extent donor-funded foreign trainings benefit the Pakistan government in improving its public sector capacity. A qualitative method, semi-structured interviews, was used to collect primary data from 102 government officers— mostly civil servants who received foreign training in the past-donor officials and non-government officials.