By Judith Ugwumadu | 18 November 2013
The World Bank has approved a $50m package of assistance to support Pakistan with the implementation of its Punjab Public Management Reform (PPMR) programme.
The programme, which is a subset of the government’s Governance Reform project, focuses on addressing constraints to service delivery. The bank said it expects the programme to help improve transparency and resource management at the targeted departments within Punjab.
Rachid Benmessaoud, country director for the World Bank Pakistan, said: ‘Despite being the country’s biggest and wealthiest province, Punjab faces significant governance, poverty reduction and inequality challenges.
‘The programme will help the government of Punjab in delivering quick results in public services while sustaining the reform momentum.’
Weak performance management was identified as the most critical constraint to improving service delivery among the departments responsible for public services. The bank also observed that citizens faced significant challenges in accessing government services due to the strongly entrenched positions of field officials and other structural handicaps such as distance, language, cultural practices and lack of information about services.
The bank said that, without good administrative data, it was difficult to assess whether government programmes were achieving their goals, identifying the required corrections and holding government agencies to account.
It added that the provincial government was acutely aware of these challenges and had undertaken several initiatives to improve the efficiency of service delivery.
Zubair Khurshid Bhatti, the programme’s task team leader, said: ‘The absence of reliable information about performance and service delivery, limits accountability of those along the service delivery chain.
‘This operation will support the government of Punjab in collecting information about service delivery and performance, making it available to citizens and decision-makers, and strengthening feedback loops for improved accountability.’
The instrument that will be used for this operation is a Program for Results (PforR) credit.
The PPMR program would be the first World Bank operation that will utilise the PforR lending instrument in the public management sector in Pakistan.
