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| 22 January 2004 | Thursday | 29 Ziqa'ad 1424 |
$20m grant lost to bureaucratic snags
ISLAMABAD, Jan 21: Pakistan lost a $20 million grant due to bureaucratic hurdles, the head of an international donor agency said on Monday.
The United Nations Population Fund failed to disburse the grant for welfare projects because of a sluggish approach of bureaucracy, UNFPA Country Representative Olivier Brasseur said.
"There are enormous difficulties in the way of spending project resources in Pakistan and we are disappointed that we could not disburse the $20 million gift money to Pakistan because of bureaucratic problems," he elaborated.
Mr Brasseur said the UNFPA had asked the government to remove problems in the way of foreign spending for social uplift projects. He said the UNFPA had decided to offer a $50 million grant for the four-year Country Action Plan (2004-08) for which an agreement was likely to be signed with the government on Jan 27.
He said the population welfare programme in Pakistan needed to be strengthened to reduce the population growth rate. He said the country should associate clergy with the programme the way Iran and Bangladesh did to reduce their population growth rates.
The government claims that the population growth rate has come down to close to 2 per cent but unofficially it is still a little over 2.1pc. "I am meeting religious leaders and trying to tell them that they should not oppose family planning and as a first step Maulana Fazlur Rehman has agreed with me that there should be a spacing in child birth," the UNFPA official said.
He regretted that about 35 mothers were dying everyday in the country due to bad health, particularly insufficient health facilities. He observed that despite enough foreign funding, the Basic Health Units and Family Welfare Centres were not providing desired service to people.
"Whenever we visit these BHUs and welfare centres we don't find contraceptives and other related facilities there," he pointed out. Mr Brasseur suggested that government servants should be offered better salaries and environment for expecting better results.
According to the latest UNFPA report, the poor quality of service at primary and secondary level was a compounding factor for low attendance to the Family Friendly Facility Initiative.
The UNFPA will provide support to health and population facilities on the basis of a mutual agreement between the UNFPA and FFFI to foster quality, reliability and continuity of services. This initiative will also be extended to NGO-managed institutions.
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