ISLAMABAD, Feb 24: Pakistan's bilateral and multilateral donors have urged the government to substantially increase budgetary allocations for social sectors and improve the weak implementation process in the country.
Informed sources told Dawn here on Monday that the government has convened a meeting with the donors on Tuesday to discuss the agenda for a three-day meeting of the Pakistan Development Forum (PDF) being held from March 17 to 19, and take the participants into confidence about the strategy to implement the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP).
"But our main concern is the implementation process which is still very weak and slow and needs to be largely improved to achieve the objectives of alleviating poverty in Pakistan", said a source in the donor agency.
Over 30 representatives of the donors would attend the Tuesday's meeting including those from the World Bank, IMF, Asian Development Bank, various United Nations' development agencies, the United States, Japan, Germany, Netherlands, France, Britain, Italy, Belgium and Canada.
So far the government has not finalised the agenda for the PDF meeting, formerly known as Aid-to-Pakistan consortium. "The agenda will be finalised in consultations with donors' representatives", said a senior government official.
He said that various concerns of the donors community will be removed about the current low level of budgetary allocations for poverty alleviation and improving the implementation process.
Another source in the donor agency said that Pakistan needed to carve out a wide ranging strategy to remove the concerns of the donors. The amount of debt servicing, he said, has substantially reduced and the budget deficit was gradually reducing, "but we don't know why the government is not increasing public sector expenditure specially when it is saving so much funds".
He said that various indicators finalised in the PRSP will come up for detailed discussion in the PDF meeting. "Why there is no considerable reduction in population growth rate, why 20 per cent enrolment rate in schools is not being achieved and why the qualified teachers are not being inducted in schools are the issues which will come up for detailed discussion in the PDF meeting", he said.
One of the important issues, he pointed out, was the elimination of corruption from the public sector development projects for which the donor and the government needed to come up with a certain strategy during the three-day PDF meeting.
He said that the forthcoming PDF meeting would not be a pledging session, but it would certainly provide certain assessment to the donors to enable them to plan their financial support offers to Pakistan in the short and long term. The government has assured donors in the poverty paper (PRSP) that it would make available roughly Rs 200 billion for the next PSDP.
