Qazi Azmat Isa of Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) has regretted that public sector has failed completely in providing basic facilities to people and the gap between the poor and rich has widened in recent years. Speaking at stakeholders' dialogue on PPAF and SDPU joint report on tracking inequality, he stated the he does not see any serious attempt either on the part of public sector or private to address the growing inequality.
The report analyses the policy and practice recommendations emerging from the "Geography of Poverty in Pakistan - 2008-09 to 2012-13, Distribution, Trends and Explanations" at district level multidimensional poverty in Pakistan and provides policy recommendations and guidelines.
Abid Sulheri of SDPI stated that poverty may be decreasing across the country but inequality gap has been increasing. He said there are quite a few social networks at federal and provincial level and because of not being integrated, these are overlapping each other. PPAF collaborated with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in 2015 to undertake this study to look into multidimensional poverty in Pakistan at the national, provincial and district levels from 2008-09 to 2012-13.
The findings of the report, meeting of stakeholders was told to show the stark rural-urban, inter-provincial and intra-provincial (district level) inequalities in the levels of poverty. By using four measures of poverty, headcount ratio, extreme poverty, intensity of poverty, and the index of multidimensional poverty, it tracks the change in poverty in districts over the five years.
The report estimates poverty by using 27 indicators pertaining to four dimensions of wellbeing, ie, education, health, living conditions, and assets ownership. There are also stark inter-provincial differences in the incidence of poverty that persist over time.
The highest poverty is found in Balochistan followed by KP and Sindh, whereas the lowest poverty is found in Punjab. In 2012-13, 62.6 per cent population of Balochistan, 39.3 per cent of KP, 37.5 per cent of Sindh, and 24.3 per cent of Punjab was multidimensional poor.
This report also offers some of the potential explanations underlying the differential distribution of various measures of poverty across districts. These include differences in: population density, governance (access to and quality of public services), industrial agglomeration, natural resource endowment, patterns of migration, gender relations, and natural and manmade disasters.
The report makes a strong case for the overall development and poverty reduction policies that need to be prioritised in the districts that have the highest incidence of poverty as well as those that host the largest number of poor. Poverty alleviation strategies and development policies must therefore be contextualised and tailored to address the unique aspects of each cluster as poverty is far more than a paucity of means but rather a poverty of minds, opportunities and freedoms.