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ADB To Finance Women's Health Project in Pakistan

About 15 million rural women and children in Pakistan will benefit from a US$47 million concessional loan approved today by the Asian Development Bank for a Women's Health Project. In particular, the project aims to reduce the number of maternal and infant deaths, as well as the fertility rate.

The health status of women in Pakistan is poor compared with other countries in Asia. Some 30,000 women die each year due to pregnancy complications and 10 times more women develop life-long, pregnancy-related disabilities. About one quarter of all children suffer from low birth weight due to maternal problems and 10 percent of those born do not reach their first birthday.

In its Ninth Five-Year-Plan, the Government accords high priority to women's development, including health. The project comes under the umbrella of the Government's Social Action Program (SAP) which was introduced in 1993 to redress neglect of the social sectors and accelerate human development. The country's human development status is marked by inequalities between rural and urban populations and incomes, and between women and men.

The project will reduce gender and rural-urban imbalances in the health sector. Project activities will directly improve access to health care, as well as the health status, of women, girls and infants in rural areas. It will target twenty districts in four provinces, eight in Punjab, and four districts each in Sindh, North-West Frontier Province, and Balochistan.

The Project has three main objectives. One is to expand to underserved women interventions in health and nutrition, education, family planning, skilled delivery care, and the control of communicable diseases. Secondly, the project will develop women-friendly health care from the community to first-referral level. Thirdly, it aims to strengthen the capacity of institutional and human resources of the Ministry of Health and the provincial health departments to sustain women's health care in the long term.

Under the first component, community-based health care and family planning services will be expanded through female health workers and safe delivery campaigns, and women's health will be promoted through the mass media. The second component will develop 20 women-friendly district health systems by strengthening the district health management, developing women's health services and referral, and mobilizing social support for women's health. The third component will support project coordination, capacity building, policy development and advocacy.

Each year, the project will primarily benefit about 2.4 million women of reproductive age and 600,000 infants. Improving women's health will also bring substantial economic gains in terms of improved productivity, better returns on investment in children, and the benefits of population planning.

The project will be cofinanced by the OPEC Fund and UNICEF. The ADB loan, which will cover 63 percent of the total cost, will come from the Bank's concessional Asian Development Fund. It will be repayable within 32 years, including a grace period of eight years. It will carry an interest charge of 1 percent per annum during the first eight years, the grace period, and 1.5 percent a year thereafter.

The Ministry of Health at the federal level and the provincial health departments of the four provinces will be the executing agencies for the project.

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