ISLAMABAD, Sept 23: The United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) and the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) will soon enter into an agreement amounting to $10 million to help improve access of poor people to basic health care, primary education and opportunities for economic empowerment.

The financial assistance is in addition to the UNDP’s earlier commitment of providing $1.25 million to the NCHD for its projects, said Dr Nasim Ashraf, Chairman NCHD, here on Monday.

Talking to newsmen, he said it was for the first time that the UNDP had been engaged in a such a partnership.

He stated that the UNDP had also decided to waive the administrative charges that were normally applied for handling non-core resource and for providing supervisory and implementation support services to projects.

He recalled that President Pervez Musharraf in his address to the 57th session of the United Nations General Assembly had mentioned that Pakistan had become the first country to set up a human development fund and a national volunteer corps to achieve the goals of poverty alleviation and human development.

The UN had greatly appreciated Pakistan’s efforts of achieving these goals, he said, and added that worth mentioning was the establishment of a community-based education fund recently initiated in Mardan by the NCHD.

Dr Nasim Ashraf said that the executive director of the

US committee for UNDP had also confirmed that the

US-based Pakistanis would be able to channel their donations for the UNDP projects in Pakistan.

Speaking about the Mardan project, he said it had been a great success as the Mardan education department had identified 37,163 children for enrolment in schools who had not been receiving education at any school, and out of them 22,885 children had so far been enrolled.

The objective of 100 per cent enrolment in the district was thus expected to be achieved by Sept 30, he observed.

He said that 5,000 volunteers in the Mardan district also surveyed over 240,000 households and collected information about people below the age of 39 years, thus paving a way for identification of illiterate adults and children and facilitated the enrolment of children under 5-7 years in formal schools in the first stage.