PESHAWAR, May 11: The participants of the one-day workshop here on Saturday suggested that the ratio of local population with refugee population should be consider the basic criteria for the selection of proposed projects for rehabilitation of refugees in hosting areas to mitigate the losses in social and economic sectors.
They mainly focused on health indicator and degradation of natural resources in the long presence of refugees in the province and Fata.
The workshop on projects for rehabilitation of refugee was organized by the United Nations Development Programme at a local hotel which was attended by various stake-holders including district Nazims, political agents, UNHCR, Essential Institutional Reforms Operationalization Programme, WWF, Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees and representatives of various NGOs. Provincial minister for finance Farid Rehman and resident coordinator UNDP Onder Yucer also spoke.
The UNDP in collaboration with the UNHCR have undertaken a three- year rehabilitation projects in the refugee hosting areas of NWFP, Balochistan and Fata. The rehabilitation projects will cost $40 million which will be spent on health, water and sanitation, education, community empowerment, capacity building, income generation and infrastructure development while Peshawar and Quetta will get major chunk of the project.
An official told Dawn that the NWFP government had already recommended four districts — Peshawar, Kohat, Chitral and Mansehra — the target areas where rehabilitation activities would be initiated under the projects. NWFP and the adjacent tribal areas host 1.9 million Afghan refugees, out of 3.5 million registered refugees in Pakistan who adversely affected the social and economic infrastructure of the province.
The UN umbrella organizations like UNDP and UNHCR came under fire in the workshop and the district Nazims in their speeches came down heavily over what they described the step-motherly attitude of the donor agencies towards this province. They said that the socio-economic infrastructure of the province was on the verge of collapse due to the influx of millions of refugees.
Speaking at the workshop the Peshawar city district Nazim Azam Afridi said: “The donor agencies are involved in lip-service instead of taking concrete initiatives for the rehabilitation work in the provincial metropolis”.
He said that since he had assumed his office last year he had only attended meetings with these organizations.
He complained that some donor agencies were executing projects in Peshawar without taking into confidence the city district government, adding that a number of development projects had been shelved in the city after Sept 11, 2001.
District Nazim Chitral Shahzada Mahudin termed the proposed $40 million grant insufficient to rehabilitate the physical infrastructure of the refugee hosting areas.