The Government of Pakistan will secure a mixture of loans and grants worth $761 million from the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) for the next five-year Emergency Polio Eradication Program.
It has been proposed that the five years (2022-26) Emergency Plan for Polio Eradication will be financed through foreign funding from GPEI donors, partner organizations, and Government of Pakistan financing through a loan to be secured from the IDB, official documents available with ProPakistani.
The program will be implemented in selected districts of Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Jammu Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Islamabad Capital Territory.
The third revised PC-I, which was approved by the Planning Commission of Pakistan, is an extension of the existing PC-I for the next five year period 2022-2026, in line with the current National Emergency Action Plan (NEAP) for Polio Eradication 2021-23 and the GPEI strategy 2022-2026, with focus on eliminating the Wild Polio Virus and cVDPV2 across the country and achieving post-polio certification.
The total cost of the third revised PC-I of the five-year Emergency Polio Eradication Program is $798.67 million, while the program requires financing worth $761.17 million for the time period of the next five years (January 2022-December 2026) as $37 million is available from the previous PC-I.
The proposed lending from the loan portion is $192.5 million of the total estimated cost of $798.67 million while funds from the grant portion are $606 million.
The program has carried forward savings of $37.5 million in the loan portion of the funding from the second revised PC-1 (2019-2021), and the remaining $155 million will be secured from the IDB. As per practice, the program will request the Economic Affairs Division to secure $155 million from the IDB for this purpose.
The GPEI’s partners have established a system of Financial Resource Requirement (FFR) for the grant portion and will pool all the generated funds as per the component for the convenience of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to deal directly with them. Of the total estimated cost of $798 million, the GPEI has been requested to generate the remaining amount of $606 million for a complete five-year period (2022-26).
