PESHAWAR, Nov 28: Peshawar is the first city in Pakistan that has entered into partnership with the Cities Alliance, a global partnership to help cities meet the urban challenges of 21st century.

A statement by City Development Strategy issued here on Wednesday said that a city development strategy had been finalized for Peshawar in collaboration with the City Alliance. By entering in this partnership, Peshawar is the first city in Pakistan that has the honour of entering into partnership with the Cities Alliance.

It says: “Cities Alliance is a global partnership to cities meet the urban challenges of the 21st century of pro-poor policies, good urban governance and prosperous cities with slums”.

It stated that the Peshawar city development strategy would be developed as a result of consultations with various stakeholders groups. During the preliminary consultations, some issue have been identified and local solutions for addressing these issues would be recommended through participative process.

As a part of this process, the statement informed, a major problem identified has been the lack of awareness amongst the common citizen of Peshawar and a lack of communication by the government. In this regard, a communication strategy had been developed for Peshawar city district under the City Development Strategy (CDS).

It says: “the first objective of the communication strategy is to create awareness about CDS and the second is to involve people in the process of identification and prioritization of problems as well as offering solutions to the problems faced by the Peshawar city district”.