AS if the job wasn’t difficult enough, Pakistan’s polio vaccination efforts are now suffering due to a shortage of funds.

The Ministry of National Health Services has said that the countrywide polio vaccination and awareness programme will come to a halt if funds are not arranged within the next two months. Once the trained workforce of 2,000 communications specialists as well as polio workers disperse due to nonpayment of stipends and salaries, it will be very difficult to bring them back and restart the programme.

Moreover, vaccination efforts at the Chaman border crossing appear to have suffered for a number of days now and officials of the health ministry claim that they are reduced to arranging funds from alternate sources as a stopgap measure.

Also read: Health ministry running out of funds for polio campaign

The funding difficulties have been attributed to the ongoing political crisis in Islamabad which has distracted the government from its day-to-day responsibilities. In this case, those responsibilities include convening a meeting of the Economic Coordination Committee of the cabinet, in which representatives of the provincial governments are present, to approve the PC I for the campaign, which will open the doors for funding from various donor organisations to flow in.

An ECC meeting was held recently, but apparently representatives of the provincial governments were not present, reportedly due to the political crisis.

Having braved security challenges, the anti-polio campaign now has to brave bureaucratic hurdles and a political stand-off. A mixture of four different government bodies and committees had to sign off on the funding the NHS requires to run the campaign.

First it was the Central Development Working Party which approved the PC I, but the Planning Division required approval from the Council of Common Interests. When this was also achieved, the ECC had to sign off. One grows weary simply reading all the names and acronyms that make up government red tape, only to learn at the end that approval could not be obtained because a political crisis prevented key members from attending the last meeting.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation is preparing to review its decision to impose temporary travel restrictions on people travelling from Pakistan. That review is scheduled for November. What a pity it would be if the government is forced to tell the WHO to postpone its review because it has been unable to implement the required steps due to the political crisis in Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2014