ISLAMABAD
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government plans to invest Rs17.55 billion ($65 million) in strengthening local institutions and improving public service delivery in the province’s merged areas under a World Bank-backed rural investment and institutional support project.
According to official documents available with Wealth Pakistan, the Institutional Development of Merged Areas initiative is one of five components of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Rural Investment and Institutional Support Project.
The project covers all districts of the Newly Merged Areas (NMAs) and Frontier Regions (FR) of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and combines investments in infrastructure, institutional development, flood response, project management and emergency response.
The Rs17.55 billion institutional development component will finance investments aimed at improving the government’s responsiveness to citizens, with particular emphasis on lower tiers of government and public service delivery.
A major part of the initiative involves institutional strengthening and capacity building of village councils and communities. Support will be provided for participatory planning, budgeting and monitoring, as well as strengthening social accountability systems, community development and behavioural-change outreach.
The project will also provide conditional grants to village councils to finance local infrastructure priorities in line with community preferences.
According to the documents, the government will finance the deployment of social mobilisers and provide engineering support to village councils to help develop and implement village-level sub-projects.
The local schemes may cover water supply, sanitation, footpaths, boundary walls, rehabilitation and construction of small-scale irrigation canals, and community halls and village council offices.
Selected sub-projects will be financed through conditional grants to village councils based on the fulfilment of basic access conditions.
Another component of the initiative involves the establishment or improvement of public service delivery centres at the tehsil level to facilitate citizens’ access to government services, particularly civil and vital records.
The institutional development initiative forms part of a broader five-component programme designed to integrate the merged areas more closely with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s provincial systems.
The largest component, Multisectoral Investments and Improved Service Delivery to Merged Areas, carries financing of Rs47.25 billion ($175 million). It focuses on extending state systems to the merged areas through investments in infrastructure and addressing gaps in service delivery.
The component covers water supply and sanitation, rural roads, agriculture and irrigation infrastructure, with investments directed towards high-priority and critical infrastructure to improve connectivity, economic productivity and human capital outcomes.
Water and sanitation investments will prioritise underserved areas and include clean drinking water, sanitation services and wastewater treatment. Agricultural interventions will support value addition and processing, diversification, productivity improvement, marketing and training.
