ISLAMABAD, Oct 21: The Asian Development Bank will approve a new investment package worth $270 million for Pakistan in November this year.

This new ADB assistance is an integral part of the proposed Decentralisation Support Programme (DSP) that the ADB has been preparing with input from the government over the last two years.

The new assistance will support the legal, institutional and capacity-building costs of devolution and related reforms with a focus on local government performance, accountability and service delivery.

According to an announcement made by the local office of the Asian Bank here on Monday, the ADB over the last two years has been assisting the government of Pakistan in its efforts to create an enabling environment for service delivery and poverty reduction through reforms in legal, technical and fiscal domains in support of decentralisation. To date, the ADB has provided $1.4 million in grant for fiscal decentralisation, an essential component of the decentralisation reforms.

In addition, it has provided a grant of $600,000 for gender reform programme, which is essentially linked to the larger reform menu leading to decentralisation of financial and administrative functions from the provincial to local governments.

As further support for fiscal decentralisation, the ADB in September this year has approved an additional $450,000 technical assistance grant to support implementation of decentralisation reforms.

This technical assistance grant is scheduled to become effective in October 2002 and will be implemented over a period of 18 months from October 2002 to March 2004. The support to implementation of devolution technical assistance is designed in the context of the requirement to mobilise and direct an array of technical, institutional, and fiscal resources in support of devolution in Pakistan. This assistance will reinforce the federal government’s efforts to coordinate development assistance for decentralisation.

The technical assistance’s primary outputs will include (i) effective utilization by federal and provincial implementing agencies of resources, including aid-financed grants and investments, allocated to implementation of devolution; (ii) established monitoring and evaluation arrangements providing timely and strategic information on (a) progress with implementation of reforms, (b) compliance with budget management and accountability requirements, and (c) the quality of institution and capacity-building efforts; and (iii) the creation of an informed and articulate constituency for the devolution process through regular exchanges of information and consensus-building among stakeholders, both domestic and international.

The technical assistance will support a project support office in the ministry of finance to be assisted by short-and long-term experts to provide help to federal agencies (Controller General of Accounts, Auditor General’s Office, ministry of women development, National Reconstruction Bureau), provincial agencies (planning and development, finance, local government, women’s development) and statutory bodies (province finance commissions, local government commissions), and local governments. Subject to province-by-province agreements with the ministry of finance, project support offices will be established in each province to oversee activities at provincial and local government levels.

By establishing these support offices ahead of the effectiveness of the proposed DSP and collateral support by assistant agencies, the technical assistance strategy is to build a momentum through which the timely, coordinated and more effective deployment of additional technical resources, including those to be financed by the DSP TA investment, may be assured.

The ADB expects that this technical assistance project will provide the required resources to strengthen and sustain the decentralisation reforms in Pakistan.