Govt to include 4 more districts
By RAMZAN CHANDIO September 20, 2009 KARACHI - In an initiative to extending the Union Council Based Poverty Reduction Programme to other four districts, the Sindh government has invited the proposals from Community based organisations to initiate scheme in various sectors, officials told The Nation.
Claiming the success story of this programme initiated in two districts, Kashmore-Kandhkot and Shikarpur on pilot basis, the provincial government planned to extend it in four other districts of the province, Thatta, Badin, Tharparkar and Jacobabad.
The Planning & Development Department’s initiative, which is being implemented through an non-governmental, Sindh Rural Support Programmes, in Sindh aims at improving the quality of life of communities especially of the vulnerable male and female poor living below the poverty line in rural areas that lack basic facilities.
Owing to positive impacts of the programme in the pilot districts, the Government of Sindh is now planning to replicate the programme interventions in four other districts of Sindh.
A senior official of the Planning and Development Department told The Nation that government intends to hire Sindh Rural Support Programmes and Community based organisations for the replication of Union Council Based Poverty Reduction Programme in four other districts of Sindh, Thatta, Badin, Tharparkar and Jacobabad districts.
However, the government has set October 5, 2009 as last date for submitting the proposals for community based organisations.
He said that the menace of poverty in Sindh is giving birth to different kinds of issues including social unrest, crime and increase in suicide attempts so in order to contain and eradicate poverty, PPP led coalition government of Sindh has initiated a number of projects/schemes.
The Union Council Based Poverty Reduction Programme (UCBPRP) is one of such major initiatives, which being extended other districts, he said, adding that for this purpose, a comprehensive poverty reduction project, based upon interventions specially focusing and targeting all the vulnerable and poor households that live below the poverty line in all the rural Union Councils of the above mentioned districts, is required to be implemented over a 36 months period.
The project goal is to be achieved through implementation of inter-related project outputs such as undertaking poverty profiling of all the households for identifying the vulnerable and poor households and organise the households into Community Organisations clustered into Village Organisations, he maintained.
Official further said that building the capacity of the population living below the poverty line through social mobilisation in the rural areas to empower the local communities both socially and economically, improving social indicators relating health, education, environment, especially for women and children and providing in-kind income generating grants are the goals of this project. However, to provide Community Investment Fund (CIF) to Village Organisations for disbursing interest free loans to CO members for income generation, to provide for productivity enhancement interventions to be carried out in Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, and Enterprise by establishing networking with existing line departments/district governments and community members trained in different interventions. Livestock related interventions such as training in livestock and farm management practices would be carried in collaboration with Pakistan Dairy Development Company (PDDC) are also objective of programme.
To undertake Low Cost Home Improvement by providing required technical and material support to 9,500 rural households that are in lowest band of poverty. The house may comprise of one room of 14x20 size, one veranda, one small kitchen, one small toilet, and one small bathroom, to provide scholarships for technical/vocational training; to provide low cost village improvement schemes including making functional the non functional public facilities present in the villages and provision of drinking water supply schemes as Community Physical Infrastructure schemes also to be initiated through this project.
The community based organisations will submit the technical and financial proposals to carry project aims to hit the poverty in rural areas.