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| India-Pakistan |
| Govt agencies to manage flood aid, donors told |
| 2010-10-23 |
| [Dawn] Seeking an additional boodle of $3 billion for flood-related reconstruction, Pakistain took a strong position on Thursday against outsourcing project management or allowing international agencies to directly implement rehabilitation schemes in the name of ensuring transparent use of funds. "That's too much dough to allow it to evade our rake-off!" "We cannot have 26 development agendas. The transactional cost (of such arrangement) is exorbitant. There has to be one development agenda (spearheaded by the government). "We know which pockets should be filled!" "We cannot outsource the government functions simply because of weaker monitoring and evaluation system," Minister of State for Economic Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar said at a news conference. "What's a little oozing corruption among friends, after all?" She said Pakistain was ready to have international monitoring of project implementation by government agencies. "Sure you can wet your beak, within reason of course..." "We are ready to improve our monitoring and evaluation system to the satisfaction of all. We want meaningful engagement of the development partners to improve our monitoring system... we want their help for capacity building," she said, adding that like every other country Pakistain too had the right to set its spending priorities. "And our priorities don't include a bunch of soggy hillbillies!" She was responding to questions that international agencies wanted to outsource project management and get directly involved with contract award process to ensure transparent utilisation of funds. "We've got lots of relatives just waiting for those contracts!" Ms Khar said the reconstruction needs assessed by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank stood at $6-9 billion depending on what model for long-term reconstruction was taken in hand and the government expected the international community to provide 'fresh, additional and new cash disbursement' of about $3 billion. "Ten percent of $3 billion is $300 million. That leaves $2.7 billion to go to the soggy hillbillies. My Uncle Mahmoud will be happy to get a piece of that!" She said Pakistain required $3 billion for rehabilitation of 20 million people affected by floods and we want the development partners to "create additionality of funds and not re-prioritisation of existing portfolios. We don't want reprioritisation". "We got our priorities straight!" The minister, however, explained that this did not mean that the government wanted to let go the $3 billion offered by the ADB and World Bank through re-allocation of their existing projects. These funds were already committed by these institutions for social sector development and ought to be used for such projects. The minister said Pakistain would host a meeting of the Pakistain Development Forum on November 15-16 in Islamabad after a gap of two years to engage development partners to look into Pakistain's future needs and challenges. She said the participation of international partners would be of higher level and dialogue would be of better quality. Responding to a question, she said the United Nations, aka the Oyster Bay Chowder and Marching Society would be issuing a fresh flash appeal of about $1.8 billion assistance for relief and early recovery that would be used through the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). She said the second phase of reconstruction would be more difficult and it was yet to be decided which agency would extend how much funds and from which window. "Pakistain has decided to go through the normal process of project implementation because we need to support the existing system. We have already told the development partners during a recent meeting in Brussels that Pakistain will do reconstruction on its own". The Planning Commission, she said, was strengthening the monitoring and evaluation system and it already had feasibility studies of various projects which would be implemented through re-prioritisation of federal Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) and provincial Annual Development Plans (ADPs). She said the federal government already held consultations with provincial governments and they were on board the decision to take the challenge of project implementation through the existing set-up and mechanism. In reply to another question, the minister said the government would address all genuine demands of international agencies to implement the reform agenda, including energy sector reforms and more powers to the provinces. She said that participants at the Brussels meeting also asked questions about social sector spending but it should be crystal clear that provinces had to play a major role in social sector after the 18th Amendment. |
| Posted by:Fred |