In a shocking report, the Financial Times has revealed that buildings in more than 9 in 10 schools in Pakistan delivered under a £107m project funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development are not fit for purpose. Their track record is not good when it comes to utilising foreign aid.
The shoddy state of the schools which were delivered in the form of a ‘UK aid’ project has landed 1,15,000 children in makeshift classrooms as the new academic year begins. The foreign aid programme is focused on the Pakistani provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab.
Pakistan does not have a very good track record when it comes to utilising foreign aid anyway.
This strengthens the belief that Pakistan’s local authorities might have had a role to play in the shoddy construction work which has rendered a vast majority of the schools built under the £107m project unfit for the purpose.
Even in 2010, when Pakistan had received $800 million in the form of international aid as a contribution to flood aid, there were concerns globally about how the funds would have been utilised by the Pakistan government given that it is infamous for corruption and inefficiency.
The Financial Times has reported that according to the internal DFID documents seen by it, new and renovated facilities, including classrooms and washrooms, at 1,277 of the 1,389 schools covered by this massive aid programme are affected by structural defects. Therefore, the taxpayers’ money in the UK which was used for giving financial aid to Pakistan in the education sector has gone largely unutilised. The structural design problems are rather serious imperilling the school buildings to collapse, especially in areas prone to earthquakes.
The main contractor for this project for developing schools is ‘IMC Worldwide’, a UK based company which specialises in delivering infrastructure projects in developing countries.
The Financial Times report has stated that the DFID had allowed the IMC to continue with the project despite two separate assessments way back in 2016 raising concerns about the building quality. In June this year, a third safety report commissioned by DFID discovered defects in the construction and design of the schools built under the project.
The UK authorities have now asked IMC to take necessary action. Alok Sharma, the newly appointed international development secretary said that it was unacceptable how school buildings built on the behalf of the UK were not constructed as per the required quality. He said that the IMC would be retrofitting all affected classrooms “at no extra cost to the British taxpayer”.
The IMC has come under fire over the quality of construction and design flows in the schools built under the UK aid programme. However, it would be wrong to place the entire blame on IMC and absolve the local agencies of Pakistan altogether.
It is practically impossible to believe that the local authorities did not have a role to play in the substandard quality of the school buildings which have been built. The move has also led to calls for investigation into the matter within Pakistan.
Sakib Sherani, a former adviser to the finance ministry demanded the government to review how local authorities work in the country. He said, “this is much too vital not to be followed with a detailed review.”
This development comes at a time when there is already a sentiment brewing in the United Kingdom in favour of cutting the foreign aid budget. In such circumstances, cutting foreign aid to Pakistan should figure at the top of the United Kingdom’s strategy to reduce the total foreign aid budget.
This incident has only brought to the surface how extending financial aid to Pakistan can go wholly unutilised and at the end of the day, it is the taxpayers’ money going to waste.
Moreover, with Pakistan, one can never just imagine if the foreign aid ends up getting consumed by the local authorities or even worse- ends up being used for strengthening the terror infrastructure which Pakistan sponsors. The latter is a highly probable outcome. One can just never be sure about which way, the finances being pumped in as foreign aid into Pakistan, are headed.
The UK must, therefore, remain careful while extending financial aid to Pakistan. It must also hold Pakistan accountable for blatant misuse of financial aid received from the UK.
