ISLAMABAD, May 17: A part of $220 million no-interest loan, approved by the World Bank for polio eradication globally, will be used to purchase oral polio vaccine for Pakistan.

The loan is part of an innovative financing partnership between the World Bank, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary International and the United Nations Foundation, which together comprise the Investment Partnership for Polio, a worldwide initiative to help eradicate polio by 2005.

“In 2002, Pakistan reported 98 new cases of polio, a significant decrease from many thousand cases occurring every year before the initiative began in the mid-1990s,” the national chairman of Polio Plus Committee for Rotary International in Pakistan, Abdul Haiy Khan, said. The remaining focal areas of transmission, however, require extraordinary efforts to reach all children, and this investment by the partnership ensures that the vaccine is available for the purpose, he said.

This loan will be funded through the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s soft-loan arm for poor countries. The partnership has established a trust fund with $25 million from the Gates foundation and $25 million from Rotary International and the UN Foundation. This $50 million investment will buy down approximately $125 million in World Bank-IDA loans. In this way, developing countries can mobilize what ultimately becomes grant funding to eradicate polio and thus contribute beyond their national borders to the global campaign to eliminate polio transmission worldwide.

Last month, the World Bank approved a similar loan for the purchase of oral polio vaccine (OPV) in Nigeria, Africa’s most polio endemic country.

To achieve the national immunization programme’s goal of acquiring a polio-free status by 2005, Pakistan will conduct four rounds of national immunization days as well as three focussed sub-national efforts in 2003, two each in 2004 and two more national efforts in 2005. The project will be implemented and monitored by the health ministry.

“Pakistan is today one step closer to achieving its goal of eradicating polio and the burden on the people and their country caused by this crippling affliction,” said Mieko Nishimizu, the World Bank Vice-President for South Asia region.

No child today should suffer from this terrible disease, when the world has the means to eradicate it. What we need is the global will to erase polio from the face of the earth. And this partnership is a fine example of such a commitment, the World Bank’s vice-president said.