Pakistan government will rely on foreign financing for the $986 million project titled Emergency Plan for Polio Eradication (2nd revision). The project, recently recommended to ECNEC for approval by the Planning Commission depends on foreign financing, which will come in grants and soft loans from the international financial and donor agencies.
According to the Planning Commission's official document, federal and provincial governments would remain dependant upon foreign aid to finance the project. Islamic Development Bank (IDB) will lend $427 million as soft loan for this project, according to financing break-up of the project. $80.26 million will come from the World Bank whereas Japan International Corporation Agency (JICA) will extend $60 million while $419.03 million are expected total grants from United Arab Emirates (UAE), Germany and other countries for the project.
Under the financing mechanism, Malinda & Bill Gates Foundation will payback the interest the country would have to pay on the loan to be secured from IDB for this project. The official documents show that PC-1 of the project has been revised second time for three years (2019-2021) with the estimated cost $986.29 million from July 2012 to Dec 2021.
The project targets four key areas: First: vaccine procurement and programme operations to ensure that all vaccination activities reach all target children; second: detection and response: to ensure rapid detection and appropriate response to any wild poliovirus (IVPV) case or evidence of low level poliovirus transmission; third: risk assessment and decision support: ensuring that programme decisions are driven by the best available data and fourth and last: management, oversight and accountability: ensuring that the programme is well-supported, managed and coordinated with oversight and accountability for all.
Interrupting the virus transmission in core reservoirs of Karachi, Quetta block and Khyber-Peshawar holds key of Pakistan success in Polio eradication, according to the official document. In order to ensure registration of all vulnerable children, tracking and vaccinating guest children as well as the newborns through the door-to-door campaigns of consistent high quality, the programme has been provided an additional assistance through UNICEF for using community based volunteers (CBV) approach.
Around 18,000 local and mostly female workers are accordingly in place in the most difficult area of polio to support campaigns, surveillance as well as routine immunization. The project is one of the important endeavours to end polio cases in Pakistan as per local and global commitments of the country. The number of polio cases has been reduced to eight in 2018 and therefore Pakistan may achieve the target of zero polio cases in the next 2-3 years, the document suggests.
The strategy envisages development of efficient mechanism for delivery of polio vaccination services through Supplemental Immunization Activities (SIAs) and interruption of wild polio virus in the country. An oversight mechanism is in place to support the implementation of the Polio Emergency Programme at all levels.