PESHAWAR, May 16: The Alliance for the Protection of Human Rights has denounced the World Bank’s Pakistan Gender Assessment Report released on May 5. According to a press release, the alliance comprising Aurat Foundation, Khwendo Kor, Shirkat Gah, Human Resource Management and Development Centre, Sungi Development Foundation, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and Noor Education Trust stated that the World Bank was not an institution that premised its policies on a social protection and rights perspective to safeguard the interests of the poor and the vulnerable.

It was interested in lending money to the government to further indebt the country with stringent loans and to pursue policies that promoted its own agenda, the alliance said.

The alliance questioned the legitimacy of the report prepared by the bank which, it claimed, would influence the government’s policies. It was beyond the bank’s mandate to make any policy recommendations to national governments, the alliance said, adding that it must not be endorsed by the government.

The alliance’s members said the report was superficial and the scant analyses did not address fundamental issues that women in Pakistan faced as a result of poverty producing policies followed by the government at the behest of institutions like the World Bank.

The bank by focusing on cultural factors as the main impediment to improvement in gender gap had absolved itself of its own policy prescriptions that were followed by the government and that had perpetuated the feminisation of poverty, they said.

They said the process underlying the production of the report had raised concerns, as it did not reflect the recommendations and issues taken up by participants of the World Bank-initiated process of stakeholder involvement.

They said the narrow geographic and sector focus of the report — health, education and family laws – was not a comprehensive analysis of women’s situation.

By evading fundamental and contextual issues pertaining to political, social and economic environment and as a result, practices that had perpetuated violence, inequality, injustice and discrimination against women in the country, the report would have detrimental effect on the women’s rights movements in the country, they said.

The alliance said there was a complete disconnection between the background papers authored by Pakistanis and the main report authored by World Bank staff in Washington. “Hardly any of the issues raised by local authors has been incorporated in the bank’s assessment, thereby stripping the report of any meaningful understanding of women’s issues and policy initiatives required to bring about a positive change,” it said.