The Government of Punjab received the first tranche of the Punjab Devolved Social Services Program (PDSSP) loan from ADB in December 2005. The $65 million tranche will support Government efforts to improve social service delivery through the local governments and help create enabling legal and policy environments for strengthening local planning and implementation. Some of the major policy actions completed by the Government of Punjab include the development of guidelines for medium term provincial social sector plans; development of bye-laws for social sector Monitoring Committees at local levels; approval of a conditional grants mechanism under the PFC; development of Compendiums on Local Government Laws, Rules, Regulations and Directives as well as of Technical and Service standards for health, education and Water & Sanitation.

ADB is providing a US$205 million loan and grant package to help increase access to quality social services in Balochistan, Pakistan. The program will support policy reforms to address long- standing systemic issues in education, health, and water supply and sanitation. It will also help the province's local governments to improve access to and quality of social services, and will empower citizens and enable the private sector to play a greater role in social service delivery.

The program is ADB's first for the social sectors in Balochistan, and follows loans that strengthened the province's local governments and resource management. The Balochistan Planning and Development Department is the executing agency for the program, which will be carried out up to about June 2009, and the TA project, due for completion in December 2010.

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Effective and efficient delivery of social services has become a priority with the Government of the Punjab. At the policy level, there has been a consistent focus on improving the service delivery mechanisms and incorporating social sector reforms through an appropriate mix of incentives for implementers. A measure of this commitment is the consistently increasing allocation both in the Annual Budget and the Annual Development Programme with social sector allocation as proportion of total ADP allocation standing at 35% in the latter. However, the Government recognizes that higher allocation needs to be accompanied by consistent improvements in governance and institutional strengthening, specially at the local government level. The Punjab Devolved Social Services Programme (PDSSP) is playing an important role in this respect and is supporting the Government of the Punjab to implement Chief Minister’s Vision 2020 and the Punjab Poverty Reduction Strategy.

It is well established that service delivery improvements can best be achieved through bottom-up and demand driven approaches. At the same time, provincial policies, priorities and programmes need to be embedded within local planning process at so as to enable fulfillment of province wide commitments to achieve the MDGs. The conditional grant mechanism of the PDSSP affords a unique opportunity to the Government to transmit provincial policies and provide incentives for appropriate investments and prioritization. At the same time the Provincial Line Departments (PLDs) need to play a significant role in providing local governments with policy guidance and create enabling legal, managerial and fiscal frameworks. The policy actions so far undertaken by PDSSP have contributed greatly in this regard. The Guidelines for preparing Five-year Strategic Plan by the Line Departments of Health, Education, Special Education and Public Health Engineering represents a watershed achievement in providing a mechanism for clarifying and documenting the sectoral vision and guide stakeholders in translating this vision into result; they also seek to discard the traditional view of planning as an ‘activity’ rather than a ‘process’. The PDSSP has also published a Compendium of Existing Service Delivery and Technical Standards, the need of which was strongly felt for some-time. This Compendium will benefit all stakeholders and we intend to review the gaps that have become evident after the development of this Compendium. Monitoring & Evaluation has always been considered by the Provincial Government as its proverbial Achilles heel. In the absence of a framework, M&E has tended to be ad-goc and fragmented. We are confident that the Social Sector M&E Framework developed by the PDSSP will help streamline and improve the M&E system both at the Provincial and Local levels. Similarly, the White Paper on Public - Private Partnership has been another purposeful effort and will serve as the base document leading to the development of a full fledged policy document as a Second Tranche Policy Action.

LGs are expected to soon avail the conditional grants and start the process of service improvements in a planned and coherent manner. However, realistically speaking, there are capacity gaps at local levels and institutional arrangements need to improve further before we can expect great improvements. The T.A funds under PDSSP will address these issues and complement the development interventions, leading to tangible gains in the efficiency, effectiveness and equity of service delivery at local levels.

The Government of Punjab does not harbour fanciful notions of the PDSSP acting as a panacea for all ills. No single intervention can be that, not least because of the massive backlog of necessary action. However, we do see the PDSSP as an extremely important intervention that provides a clear, strategic roadmap for the social sector as well as requisite fiscal and technical support for achieving results. We are confident of sustaining the reforms process under the PDSSP not only because it creates fiscal space for social sectors beyond the Programme life, but also because it is an agenda that the Government itself clearly wants to champion.

The Guidelines for Annual Sector Plans (ASPs) for Health, Education and WSS have been revised in Sindh under the Sindh DSSP; new Guidelines have also been developed for Environmental and SWM Management. The Guidelines encourage the local governments to carry out more detailed situation analysis, focus on prioritisation of needs and link resource allocations in the Annual District Budget with these priorities.

The DSSP is promoting sector wide planning at the local level and uses the ASPs as the single planning instrument. The ASPs provide details of all development activities at the local level, including their source of financing. All eligible Districts and TMAs in Sindh and Punjab develop the ASPs as part of compliance with conditions laid down to access DSSP conditional grants. The ASPs also have legal sanction, as they are to be approved by the Local Councils and made part of the Annual Budgets.

Read the detailed new Guidelines...

The newly re-constituted Punjab Provincial Finance Commission approved the mechanism for conditional grants for local governments to be released under the Punjab Devolved Social Services Programme. The newly- constituted 10-member body of the PFC met under the chairmanship of the Punjab Finance Minister Hasnain Bahadur Dareshak and agreed to release $75m over 3 years through formula based transfers, to local governments. The PFC also approved seperate MOUs detailing the conditions which District Governments and TMAs would have to comply with in order to access their respective shares from the grants. These shares will be made public by the PFC as part of transparency in funds flow.

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The Punjab Devolved Social Services Programme (PDSSP) has an extensive and clear focus on the health sector. Sixty Five percent of the ADF funds are earmarked for interventions in the health sector and would complement the Health Sector Reform Programme (HSRP), a major up-coming initiative of the Punjab Government. The Provincial Government has asssigned a lead role for PDSSP in supporting and bolstering HSRP activities. This will, in a large measure, be done by the T.A component of the PDSSP. The important tasks assigned to the PDSSP include:

The PDSSP has initiated dialogue with the implementing agency the Department of Health and other stakeholders like the Punjab Resource Management Program, to develop a framework for action.

The Government of Balochistan has begun implementation of a strong reforms agenda that includes increasing fiscal space for social sectors, setting standards for service delivery and improving human resource management at the local government level. These challenges are being taken up under the Balochistan DSSP and a high level- review took place in January 2006 with the Chief Secretary Balochistan receiving briefings on actions taken. The Chief Secretary underscored the need for the Provincial Government to fulfil its role in providing enabling environments for local governments and for providing requisite leadership on policy reforms. The Provincial Steering Committee for BDSSP was also convened as a follow-up to the Chief Secretary meeting, where specific responsibilities were determined for provincial departments.

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