Karachi among five poorest districts of Sindh

Believe it or not, Karachi, which is the industrial and commercial hub of the country and contributing around 68 per cent of the revenue to national exchequer, is among the five poorest districts of Sindh. According to a paper of Benazir Bhutto Shaheed Youth Development Programme (BBSYDP) and Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) Karachi has been placed among the five poorest district of Sindh: Thatta, Khairpur, Sanghar, Karachi and Badin.
The paper said it would be worth disclosing that the World Bank has gone satisfied enough with the progress on the Sindh government's mega programme for the alleviation of unemployment and poverty through human resource development and signed a contract for the HRD through short term skill development training of 5,050 trainees under Japan Skill Development Fund (JSDF). JSDF's $2.775 fund is a pure grant.
JSDF aims to mitigate the negative impact of the food, fuel, and financial crises on employment and income of vulnerable youth by equipping them with skills that are in demand and will facilitate their (re) entry into the job-market. The grant objective is to provide emergency job training to about 5,050 crisis-affected vulnerable youth living in urban areas of Sindh through an innovative short-term training programme that includes job placement support to help find employment and earn income.
The grant has three cross-cutting priorities. First, training should be closely oriented towards labour market needs. Second, there should be strong monitoring and evaluation to ensure graduates learn a set of in demand. Third, the project should target an equitable distribution of training opportunities, notably youth in the interior Sindh and females should equally benefit from training.
The JSDF grant aims at targeting three broad groups of crises-affected vulnerable youth. Some of these have been further divided into sub-groups. The following are the three target groups along with their sub-groups. (A) Laid off workers from formal and informal sectors. It is a known fact that the world-wide financial crises have severely affected the working class after several organisations underwent considerable downsizing and left a significant number of youth jobless.
This group targets young people that were laid off as redundant by their employers who faced the blunt of the finical crises. (B) Poor and vulnerable youth The second target group of the JSDF grant is a board cluster of poor and vulnerable youth. To ensure that there is sufficient understanding of the nature of trainees that are to be included in this group and to allow for implementation convenience the group has been divided into three sub categories
(1) Youth from BISP households. These include Sanghar, Mirpurkhaas and Tharparkar. Once the remaining BISP districts were surveyed they will be added to this list of eligible BISP districts.
(2) Youth from the five poorest districts of Sindh. The qualifying districts are Thatta, Khairpur, Sanghar, Karachi and Badin. (3) Youth from the worst flood effected districts of Sindh/ youth from recipient households of Watan card; Dadu, Ghotki, Jacobabad, Jamshoro, Kambar, Kashmore, Khairpur, Larkana, Nausheroferoze, Shaheedbanazirabad, Shikarpur, Sukkur and Thatta.
(C ) Return migrants This group has been defined to cater to the recent influx of return migrants that have been unable to hold their jobs in foreign countries. This group will include youth that retuned to Pakistan due to termination as well as completion of contract.