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| August 26, 2005 | Friday | Rajab 20, 1426 |
ADB urges improvement in local govt financing system
ISLAMABAD, Aug 25: The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has advised the government to improve the local government financing system, observing that the recent Provincial Finance Commission Awards do not ensure improvements in the efficiency of budget allocations.
It said that local budget allocations to the social sectors were in adequate and actually prevented the delivery of quality services in Pakistan.
“The budget process should enable local councils to allocate resources for their service delivery objectives — this is crucial both at the political and technical level,” the ADB said.
In its latest paper, “Improving Devolved Social Delivery in NWFP and Punjab,” a copy of which was also made available to Dawn on Wednesday, the ADB said Pakistan faced enormous challenges in delivering health, education and sanitation services.
It said: “The country has some of the lowest literacy levels and poorest health outcomes in Asia and now both the federal and provincial governments have recognized the need to change the way they deliver social services.
“There is no comprehensive picture of funding for local government social sectors before, during, or after the budget process.”
The bank’s paper said that local government budgets largely reflected allocation inherited from the pre-devolution period. The local government financial system, it said, reinforced the imbalance between salary and non-salary expenditure.
“The lack of transparency among service providers, local government administrations, and the political leadership weakened the public’s ability to hold the government to account.”
Few efforts are made to inform the public of their rights to service provision, the funds are spent on service provision, or the achievements of the local government. The overlapping layers of the Tehsil Municipal Administration and district governments, combined with vertical programmes providing services, make it difficult for any citizen to attribute the blame for poor-quality services.
The public, the paper said, did not yet perceive that councillors play a role in improving health and education services. The accountability of service providers could be prompted by involving local communities in management facilities.
Underlying poor health and education outcomes, the paper said, is a crisis in public service delivery in Pakistan where services are of poor quality and accessing them is costly.
It said: “The biggest obstacle to effective delivery in Pakistan is posed by poor motivation and lack of discipline among staff employed in these services,” the paper said. It added that health and education facilities in Pakistan are constantly in disrepair, while many water schemes do not even function. Uganda, a country with half the per capita income of Pakistan, is providing dramatically higher operational funding to schools than the NWFP and Punjab. One consequence of the poor quality and high cost of public services is that their use has fallen.
“The problems of public service delivery are deep-rooted and manifested in the lack of staff presence and professionalism, the poor quality of facilities and inadequate funding for the operation of service delivery,” the paper said.
“The system,” it said, “has been allowed to degenerate to the point where the public resource allocations are used highly inefficiently, and subject to substantial leakages. This explains why the public has turned to the private sector for service provision.”
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