Posted on

How researchers are finding solutions to Pakistan’s urban challenges

IslamabadSlums

By Hina Shaikh and Ijaz Nabi

We have discussed the scope of Pakistan’s urban challenges and the government’s response to them in this blog. But missing from this conversation is the search for new solutions to urban challenges. Here, we discuss how researchers are engaging the government to elevate urban policy.

To start off, it is important to note that key decision makers in urban policy have brought researchers to the table by giving them representation on committees, task forces, and boards of government agencies involved in urban planning. This allows researchers to engage directly in the policy process by pursuing projects designed in collaboration with think tanks and policy makers. As these projects make their way into practical application, the hope is that a culture of policy making based on evidence – rather than narrow agendas and hearsay – takes root.

Importantly, researchers are filling gaps in data that are crucial to understanding Pakistan’s urban transition and making appropriate interventions.

Here is a selection of research pushing our knowledge of urbanization in Pakistan.

Housing

Research on housing remains more focused on understanding the structure and regulation of sub-standard housing (mostly in slums) accompanied by analysis of living conditions and access to service delivery. Examples include work by the Karachi-based Urban Resource Center and Orangi Pilot Project to improve service delivery in slums. Research on housing conditions in other parts of urban Pakistan remains limited.[1]

The private sector – including banks, consulting firms, and international organizations – has stepped in to fill gaps in research. Acumen, Citi Bank, and Ansar Management Company are supporting research on housing markets and demand for housing finance especially among the poor. The World Bank is also sponsoring research to design financial products to ease access to housing credit.

Transport

With the realization that several transportation projects are being rolled out without much understanding of their economic benefits or local job markets, researchers are heavily invested in improving the design and effectiveness of future public investments in transport infrastructure.

An International Growth Centre project is measuring the impact of Lahore’s Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) on employment and human capital investment.

A study led by the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) is testing whether the provision of women’s only transport and transport vouchers can create safe and reliable public transport options for women, who frequently report harassment while using standard public transport.

Economists are also developing smartphone applications in collaboration with the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) to gather more reliable data on perceptions of safety when moving around the city[2] and better understand design flaws in Pakistan’s urban transport system that inhibit women’s mobility.[3]

Water Supply and sanitation

Research on water has gained momentum since the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) established the Center for Water Informatics and Technology (WIT), the first center of its kind in Pakistan. It aims to bridge the gap between academia and practice on water issues.

With support from the HSBC Water Programme, the Orangi Pilot Project Research and Training Institute (OPP) provides technical expertise such as sanitation mapping to influence decisions on sanitation and underground sewage systems in Karachi and small-town Sindh.

Academics from Princeton and the Lahore School of Economics collaborated to analyze the data the Punjab government collects to inform public health and sanitation policy. They found that despite much data collection, little is usable for policy analysis. Punjab is now setting up a system to monitor water quality at all urban water sources in Punjab.

Researchers, based at Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD)  and the International Growth Centre (IGC), are also investigating effective pricing policies for efficient water use. In their study of Faisalabad, they found that water pricing in fact has limited scope for changing water consumption.

Health

Researchers are developing innovative technology-based solutions to improve service delivery in the health sector (both urban and rural). Examples include the IGC-funded Monitoring the Monitors Project which uses smartphones to track doctor attendance, the Punjab government’s dengue monitoring system, which has been critical in curtailing the spread of dengue fever in urban Punjab. Both these programs have been designed in collaboration with PITB.

Another IGC-funded project finds that adopting smartphones for monitoring Lady Health Workers can increase polio vaccination coverage.

Despite these studies, solutions for improving tertiary healthcare remain under-researched.

Education

Education planning is being strengthened and informed by rigorous research that provides both new data and analysis to guide reforms. The Annual Status of Education Report, the largest citizen-led, household-based data-gathering initiative for education outcomes, offers reliable estimates on schooling, teaching quality, and learning. It is regularly cited in government documents to benchmark progress.

The path-breaking Learning and Educational Achievement in Punjab Schools (LEAPS) study analyzes schooling environments in villages to understand the difference between private and public sector education outcomes. The Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) programme is building on these findings to study system-level failures in student learning within both public and private education. Researchers from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the IGC are examining  how the role and accountability of teachers can be enhanced to improve learning outcomes.

Several other think-tanks such as the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, Alif Ailaan, Society for the Advancement of Education, Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi, and the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences are also working specifically on education, leading data collection and evidence-based research with a focus on retention, teaching, low cost private schooling, and private sector engagement.

Land management and urban planning

To facilitate urban planning and land management, experts are collating new data and reformatting existing data to inform policy. The focus is on spatial mapping and understanding urban economies – both of which are key for effective urban planning.

A recent example is the World Bank’s report on urban agglomeration and spatial mapping. For the first time in 2015, the Bank used night lights data to measure economic growth for South Asian cities over the last ten years.

Urban experts are estimating the extent of urbanization by gathering spatial data.[4] LUMS researchers have also developed a mapping technique to integrate spatial urban datasets used by different government departments, now adopted by the Punjab government’s Urban Unit. Their technique holds great promise for improving future urban policy making and implementation.

A collaboration between The Local Public Sector Initiative and the Urban Institute is evaluating urban service delivery against international benchmarks and has shown that Pakistan performs poorly on many measures.

The Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR) has recently started a collaboration with World Data Lab to build an online poverty clock for Pakistan to measure poverty levels across the urban-rural divide.

Researchers from George Mason University and the Urban Institute in Washington DC are piloting an inner city economic census in Peshawar in collaboration with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Urban Policy Unit to provide systematic insight into Peshawar’s urban labor market.

Informed by researchers at LUMS, CDPR, and the IGC, provincial governments are also focusing on strategizing under CPEC and investing in industrial policies.

Hina Shaikh is a country economist at the International Growth Centre’s Pakistan office.

Ijaz Nabi is the Pakistan Country Director at the International Growth Centre.

[1] There is one study funded by the International Growth Centre (IGC) that looks at the link between public goods provision and socio-economic hierarchies in Lahore-based slums.

[2] The project, funded by the World Bank, will record perceptions of safety by 200 men and women when moving around the city. The application will trace their movement – with their consent – and help identify security concerns and crime hotspots.

[3] It could be as simple as not having lights in a dark alley at night, a bus stop not being convenient for women, the lines at the bus stops not being gender segregated, etc.

[4] Reza Ali, an urban expert based in Karachi, uses satellite imagery and field visits to creating accurate maps of urban settlements and their population based in and around Karachi.

Posted on

Whose voice really counts? Machine politics and citizen voice aggregation in emerging democracies

Election-Posters-4_Public

By Ali Cheema, Asad Liaqat and Shandana Khan Mohmand

A central feature of democracy is that political parties aggregate citizen voice, and transform it into political mandates and programmatic policies when they form governments. Political parties are thus a central channel for making citizens’ voices count towards policies. The effectiveness with which political parties aggregate voice and how responsive policies are to the preferences expressed by their voter bases are important metrics for the strength of democracy. Recent experiences across the globe have cast doubt on how effectively these two aspects of democracy are working.

In the UK, for example, the Brexit vote revealed how disconnected party elites were from their voter bases. It also showed a widening gap between the policies that parties adopt and the preferences of their voter bases and party members. The resulting crisis of legitimacy of political party elites has emerged as an important point of discussion in western democracy.

In spite of the growing recognition of this issue in established democracies, there is little work on how well voice aggregation and policy responsiveness is working in emerging democracies. At the heart of this are the questions of how parties organize to aggregate voice, and what mechanisms ensure that this voice is reflected in policy formulation. Our research – Politics, Voice and Responsiveness in urban Pakistan – is looking at these questions.

Clientelism and citizen voice aggregation

Data from the Polity IV project shows that over the past thirty years there has been a dramatic spread of elected governments at the national and local levels. Evidence also suggests that national elections are fairly competitive in many emerging democracies. However, many democracies continue to struggle with weak party organizations at the local level. The existing evidence points to the prevalence of personalized machines of dynastic families and ethnic mobilizations, which weaken formal party structures.

How does citizen voice aggregation happen in this context? The standard answer in the literature is clientelism, particularly strong in communities where caste, ethnic and/or kinship networks underpin collective or group voting. Through clientelism, services are delivered as  quid pro quo arrangements between voters and electoral candidates. Voters make specific demands – for cash, or jobs, or a functional health center in the neighborhood – and politicians deliver these as best as they can, but only specifically in exchange for a vote. This provides strong incentives for targeted delivery of public services on a partisan basis rather than programmatic policy formulation that is likely to benefit both party and opposition voters.

Clientelist voter-politician interactions depend on reciprocity – both sides must deliver on their promise for the exchange to be complete – and on the ability of voters to aggregate their preferences. The clientelism literature suggests that it works effectively when voter-politician interactions are embedded in social networks, which are conducive to both reciprocity and aggregation. These networks provide information on whether voters who benefitted from politician delivery actually held to their side of the bargain and cast their vote for the politician in question. They also discipline the politician if the good that is contracted fails to be delivered after the elections.

What does citizen voice aggregation in Lahore look like?

However, little is known about the form actually taken by citizen voice aggregation in the megacities of emerging democracies, or how effectively it works there.

Our research explores these issues in non-elite neighborhoods in the Pakistani mega-city of Lahore, home to around 10 million people. The country made the transition from military rule to democracy in 2008, and Lahore’s politics is dominated by the ruling party, the PML-N. But a new political party – the PTI – has gained ground, and provided competition for the PML-N in 2013.

Many of our findings challenge the typical description of clientelism as citizen voice aggregation. Of those in our representative sample of 2000 adult respondents who voted in the last general election, the majority didn’t vote on the basis of ethnic, kinship or caste-based collective action. Instead, 54 percent of them report taking the voting decision independently or in consultation with their immediate family. Only 14 percent consulted with the forms of networks typically associated with clientelist exchange. In short, the group voting that is hypothesized to underpin clientelist exchange doesn’t appear to be prevalent in Lahore.

So how does the process of citizen voice aggregation work in this context? At the heart of the process are machines of political party constituency leaders that work through large networks of party workers. The evidence from our research suggests that the intensity of political party-citizen contact is much higher at the time of elections than after it. Thirty percent of our respondents reported having been in contact with a party worker at the time of elections, but only 10 percent afterwards. And an even smaller proportion reports having been in contact to express their needs for the purposes of planning public investment.

This presents a picture where party machines do exist at the local level, but do not serve as effective citizen voice aggregators. They function instead simply as the mechanism through which votes are aggregated at the time of elections. The connection between local party workers and citizens is weak after the election when programs and public investment are typically planned and executed.

Local party workers – key to understanding responsiveness?

To understand whether policy formulation and the planning of public investment is responsive to all voices, it is important to understand what determines the motivation and incentives of local party workers.

It is also important to understand which voters they are responsive to, what considerations apart from voter preferences drive their behavior, and how effective they are in influencing the choice of constituency leaders.

We are currently analyzing our data on these questions from our sample, who are located in four out of twenty-five provincial legislative seats of Lahore. We will be sharing all our research results very soon.

Ali Cheema is a research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS).

Asad Liaqat is a PhD candidate at Harvard University.

Shandana Khan Mohmand is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies.

This article was originally published on March 28th for Making All Voices Count.

Posted on

What the government is (and isn’t) doing to fix urban issues

UrbanPakistan_JimC_CCBY-NC2
(Credit: JimC, CC BY-NC 2.0)

By Ijaz Nabi and Hina Shaikh

What is the government currently doing about Pakistan’s staggering urban challenges? Where is more work needed? Here is an overview per issue:

Housing

Pakistan faces a growing housing shortfall of approximately 4.4 million units. When provided, the quality is often substandard and low income groups receive little benefit. To redress chronic housing problems, Pakistan’s only housing policy was announced in 2002. The government’s attempt in 2005 to update the housing plan with a comprehensive policy framework remains unexecuted. Until a new, official policy is adopted and implemented, the provision of low-cost urban housing will be an elusive goal.

Local governments have a limited role in resolving the urban housing crisis. They have little control over urban land[1], a lack resources to fund schemes and are unable to borrow independently from international donors.

Many announcements of government-sponsored housing projects have made headlines (such as Ashiana[2] and Apna Ghar[3]) but remain uncompleted. The Housing and Works Ministry openly admits its failure to complete various projects. Most face bureaucratic and or administrative delays or are mired by corruption scandals and lack of political will. Where construction has taken place, low income groups have received little attention.[4] To complete one housing project, Punjab is now seeking assistance from TOKI – the Turkish Housing Development Administration. Punjab also plans to sell public land to fund low-cost housing. Several schemes are underway in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Sindh as well but progress is slow.

The House Building Finance Company (HBFC) decided in October to extend housing finance to low and middle-income groups by introducing a new priority lending scheme. The State Bank of Pakistan has issued guidelines for housing finance. Donors like the World Bank are also stepping in to help launch innovative housing products targeting under-served communities. While partial attempts like these have been made to address housing problems,,  chronic housing shortages and poor quality remain unaddressed.

Water and Sanitation

In most Pakistani cities, water supply is limited and unsafe for drinking while access to waste management services remains poor.

A National Drinking Water Policy was announced in 2009 that promises safe and sustainable drinking water to all by 2025, and a Sanitation Policy was declared in 2006 aligning goals with the relevant Millennium Development Goal targets. Provincial commitment to ensuring water and sanitation services are formalized is seen in WASH[5] sector plans in Punjab and Baluchistan[6], sectoral roadmaps in Punjab[7] and other policy initiatives[8].

Initiatives have also been announced to improve waste disposal in urban centers. Karachi and Lahore, the two largest cities of Pakistan, have privatized garbage collection[9] with varying degrees of control at the local level[10]. Punjab plans to establish solid waste management companies across seven cities  as part of its sanitation roadmap and commence a district-level survey to earmark sites for waste disposal.

Provinces are also improving access to clean water. The Saaf Paani company is restoring non-functional water schemes in 37 rural tehsils of South Punjab and is keen to scale-up the program across all districts (rural and urban). Water quality testing is also routinely conducted in most cities by the Pakistan Council of Research on Water Resources (PCRWR). Its most recent report  estimates that 10 to 15 percent of bottled water is contaminated with excessive levels of either arsenic or sodium.[11] Most filtration plants  in cities are only capable of cleaning arsenic.

Untreated industrial and municipal waste water remains a major health hazard in cities.[12] In smaller cities, sewage treatment facilities are virtually non-existent. The situation is not much different in larger urban centers.[13]

Health

As use of basic public health services remains low in both rural and urban areas, key health indicators among Pakistan’s urban poor are only marginally better than the rural poor.

After a hiatus of several years following the 18th amendment, Pakistan finally has a National Health Vision (NHV) 2016-2025 to help prioritize health interventions post-devolution. All four provinces have a Health Sector Strategy. Healthcare commissions are functional in each province, regulating public and private health facilities while ensuring their compliance to minimum standards.

Technology and improved data collection at both the federal and provincial levels are significantly changing health service delivery. Islamabad has a Health Policy Strengthening and Information Analysis Unit[14] to collect health data  while health information systems are functional across all provinces. The use of internet communications technology, particularly supported by the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), is helping improve healthcare in the province especially for controlling dengue[15] and enhancing immunization[16]. Polio cases are declining steadily as both KP Punjab have launched successful inactivated polio vaccination (IPV) campaigns.

Health insurance is big on the cards as the Prime Minister launched the first ever national health insurance scheme in Pakistan last year while KP has introduced its own program via the Sehat Insaf Card[17].

Efforts to improve tertiary healthcare, however, remain inadequate as several large-scale projects remain incomplete.[18] Provinces are now engaging with the private sector to establish modern hospitals just as several primary health care services are also being outsourced.

Transport

Pakistan’s mega urban centers like Karachi are without a mass public transport system and investments in roads in place of public transport have  led to an unregulated rise in private vehicles with fewer options of public transport for the poor.[19]

The federal government has only recently signed a two-year project to formulate the first National Transport Policy with support from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for a safe, efficient and sustainable transport system. Provincial governments are making significant investments in low-cost public transport. These include mass transit projects in Islamabad, Lahore, Multan, Karachi and Peshawar.[20] Specialized transport bodies such as the Lahore Transport Company, Karachi Urban Transport Corporation and Punjab Metrobus Authority are helping manage city travel. But given the transportation needs of megacities, further investment in feeder or connecting routes is required. Currently, the construction of feeder-route networks to connect to Islamabad and Lahore are in the pipeline but facing administrative delays.

Inadequate public transport has fueled a rise in private taxi services (Albayrak, Uber and Careem). New provincial regulations in Sindh and Punjab will require these services to acquire route permits, fitness certificates and be subject to taxes. Vehicle inspection regime remains weak. Punjab has taken the lead by setting up vehicle inspection and certification system centers across the province.

Pakistan’s transport sector needs to prepare for the rise in economic activity expected in urban centers following investments under CPEC. Introducing the right land-use policies and investing in low-cost public transport can help meet the likely increase in demand.

Education

Although urban areas have better enrolment and learning outcomes, a significant number of children remain out of school.[21] The preference for private schools remains high, reflecting in part the low quality of public schooling.

The National Education Policy was announced in 2009 and provides broad goals. Provinces, responsible for education after the 18th amendment, have failed to reach a consensus on a revised policy. There are four education plans, one for each province.[22] Punjab’s expires this year and Sindh’s next year. The status of Article 25-A of the constitution that ensures the right to free and compulsory education post-18th amendment is still pending in KP, Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad-Jammu and Kashmir (AJK).

Provincial education departments are embedding education reforms within broader provincial plans. Punjab has adopted the roadmap approach for improving public schools. [23] The Schools Reforms Roadmap is based on “stock-takes” that track progress on education outcomes. Sindh and KP are implementing a similar model. The approach however varies across provinces in terms of leadership and management style. For example, progress in Punjab, unlike KP, is managed personally by the Chief Minister. This raises the question of whether centralized control is the right way to achieve outcomes as opposed to granting more responsibility at the local level.

All four provinces are now relying on technology-driven, “smart” monitoring techniques to manage the performance of public schools.[24] Provinces are also moving towards the merit-based hiring of teachers, now being recruited through rigorous testing conducted by a third-party service.

While the overall impact of these reforms is yet to be seen in terms of increased enrollment and learning outcomes, education roadmaps are helping to create a culture of evidence-based policymaking.

Land Management

Unregulated land use remains one of the top causes of ill-planned urbanization.

A policy mandate to manage urbanization has been slow to emerge at the federal and provincial levels. The need for smarter urban development first appeared at the heart of Planning Commission’s New Framework for Economic Growth in 2012. The incumbent government’s “Vision 2025” and 11th Five Year Plan (2013-18) roll out a similar agenda. Vision 2025 particularly emphasizes legal reforms for zoning, commercialization, taxation and improving urban infrastructure.

The Planning Commission recently established the Urban Planning & Policy Center to pursue smart, sustainable urban development in Pakistan. Provinces are also gearing up. The Punjab Growth Strategy endorses support for dense urban centers to attract investment and boost productivity while urban policy units in KP and Punjab are conducting research to inform urban policies. Provinces are also digitizing land records to facilitate administrative and economic decision-making and improve land allocation in urban centers.[25]

However, provinces have not designed industrial policy that looks at land usage and development of new cities[26], especially as industrial investments under CPEC are already being made[27]. While Punjab is currently identifying areas with the best potential to develop into cities and industrial estates, other provinces need to follow suit to align economically with CPEC.

What Next?

While there are many real and headline-grabbing urban initiatives (some are successful, many are not), they are not being pursued in a systematic framework for urban development. This has led to the poor prioritization of initiatives. Sensible urban development strategies are thus now essential for all provinces.

Pakistan will launch “The State of Pakistan Cities Report 2016”[28] this year to provide updated data on key urban indicators. The rollout of the population census, after a gap of 19 years, will also be very helpful. A fresh census will depict the true extent of urbanization and the size of the urban vote bank[29].

Given the size of the urban vote bank, there are political incentives to bring about sustained change. Responding to these incentives will require being guided by evidence to pursue the right development path – and learning from best local and international experience. This makes for excellent opportunities for collaboration between researchers and policy makers and will be taken up in the final blog in this series.

Ijaz Nabi is the Pakistan country director at the International Growth Centre.

Hina Shaikh is a Pakistan country economist at the International Growth Centre.

[1] Urban land in Lahore remains under the control of the Lahore Development Authority while only a third of Karachi’s land is under the city government.

[2] Aims to provide 50,000 low-cost housing units in the next 2 years. If completed the scheme will meet no more than 0.6 percent of Pakistan’s housing shortage. The government launched a similar housing scheme back in 2010 as well. Original target was to build 50,000 housing units in 21 cities of the province but in the past 5 years the government built just 370 units in only 3 cities.

[3] The Rs 500 million Apna Ghar Scheme announced in Punjab in 2013 remains limited to files. Under this scheme, the federal government was to construct 500,000 housing units in five years, under a PPP-mode, on land to be provided free of charge by the province.

[4] Pakistan Housing Authority (under the Ministry of Housing and Works) has over the past 15 years constructed only a few thousand housing units with none for low income groups. While the federal ministry is responsible for acquisition and development of sites as well as construction and maintenance of federal government buildings it bears no direct responsibility for provision of shelter to the poor.

[5] Water, Sanitation and Hygiene services

[6] Punjab WASH sector Development Plan 2014-2024, Baluchistan has also developed a 10-year WASH sector plan undergoing approval

[7] Punjab has launched a separate road map for water and solid waste management

[8] Sindh has a drinking water and sanitation policy 2016 awaiting approval while KP’s drinking water policy 2015 stands approved. Punjab has a drinking policy 2011.

[9] In Lahore, two Turkish companies were awarded a seven-year contract, by the Lahore Solid Waste Management Company valuing USD320 mn for solid waste collection, disposal and washing, back in 2012. After five years, the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board followed suit by awarding a Chinese company a USD25 mn contract for garbage collection in 2 districts of Karachi.

[10] By appointing political leaders from Lahore on the board of the waste management company, mayor of Lahore is directly engaged in supervising efforts to keep the city clean. Sindh however is centralizing the function of waste collection at the provincial level.

[11] The water quality control cell of the civic agency in Islamabad also found 53% of the water samples collected from various parts of the city unfit for human consumption.

[12] In Karachi, only two of its three waste water treatment plants are working, processing around 11% of the city’s sewage with more than 400 million gallons of waste water being dumped untreated into the rivers and, ultimately, into the ocean every day. A survey conducted by the AJK environmental protection agency has said that more than 70% spring water is being contaminated by sewerage lines running close to springs.

[13] After about seven years in operation, the only sewage treatment plant in the federal capital was closed down due to the faulty equipment and insufficient inflow of sewage. AJK government also claims to spend millions of rupees on water supply schemes but there has no visible change. Karachi has only recently launched a Sewage Treatment project, to be completed by 2018, for treating 460 mn gallons of sewage per day

[14] Established in 2015, it is equipped with a dashboard to collect credible data related to healthcare with support from USAID.

[15] A specialised Dengue Tracking System, based on an Android phone application given to field workers helps them keep records of dengue-related spraying activities by uploading geo-tagged photos of the spraying through the application.

[16] A digital system, E-Vaccs, launched in 2014 is monitoring the attendance of all vaccinators sent out into the field making immunization campaigns especially effective leading to rapid rise in coverage and increasing attendance of vaccinators from 36 to 94%.

[17] Plans to provide 1.8 million families across the province free treatment facility in public and private sector hospitals.

[18] A maternity healthcare project the Mother and Child Hospital, much needed for Rawalpindi, was started in 2005 at a cost of Rs2.5bn by the federal government remains unfinished to date. Other projects that remain incomplete include the construction of Surgical Tower at Mayo Hospital and extension of Services Hospital OPD in Lahore.

[19] Overall, inefficiencies in the performance of the transport sector costs Pakistan’s economy 4 to 6 percent of GDP – ADB estimates – Werner E. Liepach, ADB Country Director

[20]Metro Bus projects (orange and green lines) in Lahore, Multan, Islamabad-Rawalpindi and now Peshawar. Under transport infrastructure, these projects are now included within the CPEC framework such as rail based mass transit projects for all provincial capitals under which comes the Peshawar greater circular railway, Quetta circular railway, Karachi Circular Railway (KCR) and Lahore Orange Line train projects

[21] Close to 10 percent of all children in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar remain out of school. Currently Pakistan has the highest number of out of school children in the world estimated at 12.3 million at primary level.

[22] These plans can be accessed from the provincial education department websites

[23] Sir Michael Barber’s ‘deliverology approach is based on first understanding the service delivery chain from top to bottom and then establishing a small team in a central delivery unit, gathering performance data to set targets and then tracking them periodically

[24] KP has launched the first ever automated management system for schools. Punjab has launched a smart monitoring of school initiative, employing over 900 monitoring and evaluation assistants to make field visits and collect data on android tablets. Sindh’s clustering policy 2016 aims to centralize control of government schools by grouping schools within close proximity to ease coordination and monitoring and developed a directorate of monitoring and evaluation. Balochistan is using its BEMIS cell to engage in software-based monitoring activities.

[25] The Sindh Revenue Board has computerized close to 95 percent of the province’s rural and urban land, while Punjab plans to do the same for urban land following complete digitization of all rural land records. KP, AJK and Balochistan are also computerizing their land records though progress has been slower.

[26] Punjab is looking at the potential to develop a new city to act as an industrial zone[26] along the Lahore-Islamabad motorway

[27] The Planning Commission confirms nine industrial parks, to act as primary hubs of industrial activity in the country, are included in the CPEC framework to be built across four provinces

[28] Report is being spearheaded by the Ministry of Climate Change (MOCC) with technical assistance from the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) and funded by the Australian Government. This will provide updated information on key urban indicators for first level cities across Pakistan, establish appropriate urban baselines, analyze development trends and challenges to estimate the potential for investment and growth.

[29] Current estimates suggest that about 40% of the total electorate is now urban

Posted on

The six biggest challenges facing Pakistan’s urban future

karachi_pakistan_2010-01-08_lrgHina Shaikh and Ijaz Nabi

Pakistan is among the most urbanized countries of South Asia. As challenges mount, urban planning is gradually finding space in the policy discourse. This is the first of three blog posts on Pakistan’s rapid urbanization. It discusses the pace of urbanization and the major problems associated with it. This will be followed by posts on how the government is responding to the challenges and how and whether the research community is engaged in seeking solutions.
 Continue reading “The six biggest challenges facing Pakistan’s urban future”