ISLAMABAD: Around 22.8 million children between the ages of five and 16 in Pakistan – 44 percent of the total demographic – do not attend primary or secondary institutions, numbers which rise sharply with age, says the World Bank.
The bank in its latest report “Cost-efficiency considerations for the completion of road networks in open street map: a priority-based mapping approach applied in Pakistan,” stated that distance to school and a lack of provision are two of the main reasons for not attending school in rural areas of Pakistan. Limited access to services and opportunities is systematically linked to poorer development outcomes.
Further, a shortage of and long distances to health facilities hinder the access of primarily rural and poor households to these critical services. This is compounded by a dearth of transportation options with poorly maintained roads, affected by unfavourable weather and unsafe driving conditions. Responses to the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey indicate that more than half of the households in most Pakistani districts have to travel over two kilometers to reach a health clinic or hospital, entailing unequal health outcomes.
The report noted that detailed spatial knowledge of disparities in accessibility to these services is crucial to designing targeted and cost-effective policies, investments, and projects to address them. While the existence of disparities is well-known and acknowledged, they are rarely measured at the administrative levels where service provision happens and investment decisions are made, hampering efficient interventions and resource allocation.
The World Bank’s Pakistan Poverty and Equity team, together with the Pakistan Transport team, therefore refined and applied a high-resolution method to measure and visualize accessibility disparities to services at the level of Tehsils (third-level administrative units) in Pakistan. This accessibility model was applied to access to schools, healthcare facilities, and markets in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Province.
The methodology underlying the accessibility modelling is described in a recent poverty note and can be replicated in other contexts for access to any type of service, opportunity, or other points of interest through the toolkit and material available in the GitHub repository developed by the team, it added.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022