PESHAWAR, May 25: The National Plan of Action (NPA) for the Women’s Empowerment Project in the NWFP is going to be closed down by the end of the current financial year because of lack of support from the federal women’s development ministry, according to official sources.
“The provincial government has refused to own up the project due to financial constraints. So, the project having ambitious goals for women’s empowerment will be shelved by June 30,” said an official.
The NPA for the Women’s Empowerment Project was launched in 2004 and was supposed to continue until 2011. It was a direct outcome of the Beijing Conference (1995) and was announced by the Pakistani government in August of 1998.
The implementation of the project was the responsibility of the federal government with collaboration from non-governmental organisations. The project focused on 13 areas concerning women — including poverty, education and training, health, violence against women, armed conflict, women and the economy, women in power and decision making, institutional mechanism for the advancement of women, human rights, environment, women and the media, and women with disabilities.
The Unicef was funding the project through the women’s development ministry but lack of coordination between the Peshawar unit of the NPA and the federal government resulted in poor performance of the Peshawar unit, which comprised coordination, monitoring and evaluation wings, said officials.
The NPA unit in Peshawar only had two rooms at its disposal and employed six people who were supposed to conduct activities throughout the province. Due to financial constraints it only held six seminars in three years for awareness about women’s rights.
The unit was provided with Rs475,000 quarterly during a period of three years and Rs100,000 was spent on a media campaign for awareness among the public about the National Plan of Action, an official said.
“The lengthy and complicated procedure of getting financial assistance to hold activities and no response from the federal ministry for women to all our official letters is one reason for our poor performance and not achieving set objectives,” a concerned official observed.
“Payments were often delayed,” the official complained.
The coordination wing of the Peshawar unit of NPA only held meetings with four out of 24 districts in order to implement the NPA at district level, an another official said. “All targets were not achieved due to lack of support and drawbacks in policies of the federal government,” he lamented.
The federal government neither monitored nor held follow-up meetings with the NPA Peshawar unit although quarterly meetings were a requirement under the project. The federal government did not respond to letters sent by the Peshawar unit on different occasions, the official said.