ISLAMABAD, Jan 28: The World Bank has called upon the government to adequately narrow down social gap in society to alleviate poverty and contain huge public and foreign debt.

The bank also said that spanning social, economic and fiscal difficulties, the country’s current predicament was not rooted in a discrete set of policies amendable to rapid rectification, but in structural factors linked to issues of governance.

According to two major policy reports, circulated to the participants of a three-day Pakistan Human Development Forum that ended here on Saturday last, the World Bank said that it was within this context of broader failure of policy that one should understand Pakistan’s inability to take sufficient advantage or to promote adequate advances in social indicators.

“Over the past decade, stagnating poverty and a persistent, even widening social gap are direct legacies of these failures”.

Both the reports suggest issues of governance in the form of lacking accountability, voice and participation, are the heart of many difficulties encountered in mitigating poverty and a broadening access to social services in Pakistan. Neither debt reform nor the mere availability of donor funds is likely to dispel these problems.

The strategies and tactics to bolster human development in Pakistan outlined by these reports take this into account, emphasising also the need to consider and implement concomitant policies in comprehensive, mutually reinforcing manner.

The bank said that international community wanted to see Pakistan built on the important initiatives that had been launched in the past year, and to begin, step by step, to put in place the implementation arrangements that would gradually close the gap between today’s human development indicators and those that the country’s leadership strived for.

The international community understood that this was going to be a long and hard road to travel, but with the right actions taken, one by one, progress could and would be achieved.

Both the new reports said that given the government’s institutional constraints, the social protection strategy for the immediate future had to involve existing programmes like public works, targeted assistance, and programmes that involved the use of informal community-based institutions. This required improving or funding alternatives to existing formal programmes, the reports said.

“Unlike other countries, public works programmes in Pakistan have failed to smooth consumption in periods of high unemployment, in part due to their capture by patronage politics. Example of such programmes are the Rural Works Programme and the People’s Works Programme,” one report on poverty said.

In this context, however, it said that it was encouraging that the government’s recent Khushal Pakistan Programme incorporated active community participation in programme selection.