PESHAWAR, Jan 23: The NWFP government may not be able to attract any major foreign funding to support its next year Annual Development Programme because of donors’ reservations over the security situation in the province, an official told Dawn.
The authorities concerned are in contact with different multilateral lending and donor agencies to secure support for social sector development, but the official said “no major headway has so far been achieved.”
Donors, the official said, were not satisfied with the current security situation of the province despite the fact that the provincial government had given them assurances at various forums. For the last one year, no foreign mission has visited Peshawar on account of security reasons.
“This causes delay in conceptualising a number of projects forwarded to them for support,” the official maintained, adding: “There will be no major foreign-funded project in the next ADP.”
The volume of foreign funding has been on the decline for a couple of years, as according to official statistics the contribution of foreign funding to the total size of the ADP was 34.88 per cent in 2004-05, which dropped to 11.11 per cent in the current financial year 2008-09.
“This indicates donors’ disinterest in the Frontier province, which is a frontline state in the US-led war on terror,” opined the official.
Referring to a recent donors’ consultation held in Islamabad, the official said the donors had been apprised about the impacts of the ongoing insurgency on the existing infrastructure and service delivery.
Also, he added, the donors had been asked to support a proposed Comprehensive Development Strategy to help improve service delivery affected because of the current violence in the province.
About the proposed NWFP Human Development Project to be sponsored by the World Bank, the official said the initiative was pending because even the international lending agency was not certain over its mode of operation.
The World Bank, according to him, in its last year talks with the provincial government had proposed that all the donor and lending agencies intending to support uplift activities in the Frontier province should form a resource pool to be utilised for development in different sectors.
But still the donors were interacting with the NWFP government for different bilateral aid arrangements, which shows that even the World Bank hasn’t developed any consensus with its partners in this connection.
A senior official in the planning and development department said incubation period of a project ranged from 18 to 24 months so if the volume of foreign aid had declined now, it was because of the failures of the past two years, and not of today.
The official said a number of donor agencies were in contact with the provincial government, adding: “Results of these deliberations will come out after two years, not tomorrow.”