World Bank pauses implementation of $200 million Pakistan COVID-19 project

KARACHI: The World Bank has paused implementation of its $200 million Pandemic Response Effectiveness Project (PREP) in Pakistan due to a ‘significant delay” in approvals by local authorities, the lender said, though it clarified that no funds had been withheld.
The global lender approved the project in April 2020 to help Pakistan “take effective and timely action to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by strengthening the country’s national health care systems and mitigating socioeconomic disruptions.”
But eight months later, Pakistani provincial and federal governments were yet to approve the project’s blueprint, or PC-I (project Cycle-I), which is required to kickstart the project.
“The implementation of the PREP project has been significantly delayed due to the pending PC-I issue,” the Bank said in a statement. “Following Economic Affairs Division’s instruction, Federal and Provincial PC-Is were prepared for the Health component of the project. Due to a significant delay in their approval process, implementation has been on a pause. A restructuring is planned to amend one of the implementing agencies under the project.”
The global lender has also lowered Pakistan’s key implementation ratings for the project to ‘moderately unsatisfactory’ from the previous ‘satisfactory” and ‘moderately satisfactory.’
A Bank representative told Arab News that government approvals were still awaited.
“The activities under the health component are still going through the government approval process,” Mariam Altaf, External Affairs Officer at The World Bank in Islamabad, told Arab News. “No funds are being withheld. Until now, the World Bank has disbursed $79.4 million from the project total of $200 million.”
The collapse of the World Bank project will be a major blow to the South Asian nation where a second, deadlier wave of the coronavirus is picking up momentum, with 3,000 new cases reported for the second day in a row on Thursday.
The World Bank project was meant to help establish quarantine facilities in collaboration with public and private hospitals and supply equipment to hospitals, including ventilators and Personal Protection Equipment (PPEs) for doctors and paramedics.
The funding for the project came from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s concessional credit window for developing countries, of which $100 million was provided through the World Bank Group’s COVID-19 Fast-Track Facility.
Altaf said the Bank “continues to work with government counterparts so that these resources can be used quickly to respond to the current COVID-19 trends in Pakistan, as soon as approval is obtained for this health component.”
“As such, we believe the activities will commence and disbursements will increase shortly after Government approval is obtained,” she added.