The federal is seeking $300 million from the International Development Association (IDA) of the planet Bank Group to assist improve access to and quality of basic services in vulnerable communities within the districts recently merged with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Following the merger, residents of the merged areas have expressed increased expectations for improved service delivery, particularly within the areas of unpolluted water, food security, education, and health. In 2018, newly merged areas were brought under the system and governmental authority of the KP government.
The ‘Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Rural Investment and Institutional Support’ project will specialize in three key areas of support: community infrastructure grants to deal with rural infrastructure gaps; citizen monitoring of basic services delivery in key service sectors against agreed quality standards; and institutional development and community mobilization to market local capacity and to strengthen the transparency, accountability, and capacity of line departments to partner with communities for local development.
Residents expect improvements in health, education, potable water system, and food security
The project document made available to Dawn on Sunday says merged areas are worse compared to the remainder of the country, with 56 percent of the two .2 million women without CNICs. there’s also a risk that remote and historically underserved districts, including Kohistan, Tank, Dera Ismail Khan, Battagram, Upper Dir, Shangla, and Hangu — all proposed project districts — which have traditionally received lesser shares in Provincial Finance Commission awards thanks to scattered and low populations, may receive similar lesser benefits from the project.
Given remoteness, lack of transport infrastructure, condition of the facilities, and therefore the conservative or patriarchal social fabric of the communities in these areas, women, and girls are generally excluded from receiving education and first health care.
The newly merged areas (NMAs) are cover 27,224 square kilometers and subdivided administratively into seven tribal districts, each having a special tribal complexion and administrative headquarter. they’re inhabited almost exclusively by the Pakhtun people. quite twenty-four major Pakhtun tribes populate the NMAs, with most tribal districts dominated by a couple of major tribes. Enmities and disputes, going back decades, over land and natural resources are common and therefore the project will got to develop an approach to managing these local-level disputes.
It will cover rural communities in fifteen districts that have the most important service deficits, consistent with the KP Planning and Development Department, including eight districts within the settled areas of KP and 7 districts in NMAs. The geographical focus is justified by the very fact that rural communities in these districts have a number of the worst human development outcomes, the lowest voice-to-demand services, and the least likelihood of being covered through mainstream service delivery mechanisms thanks to their size and remoteness.
In addition, these areas have rock bottom capacity or resources to deal with local needs. The project will fill these gaps through a mixture of financing, technical support, and institutional strengthening. The geographic scope is going to be finalized during project preparation and should be extended during a phased approach.
Over the ten-year transition period, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will still receive federal support to deal with these priorities, but Pakistan’s fiscal challenges are expected to constrain the pace of development spending within the province to satisfy the vision of the merger.
