ISLAMABAD: The Balochistan Rural Development and Community Empowerment (BRACE) Programme has benefitted more than 2.7 million people in 257 union councils of nine districts in the province, WealthPK reports.
According to data, the people who benefitted from the BRACE Programme belong to Jhal Magsi, Turbat, Khuzdar, Killa Abdullah, Loralai, Pishin, Washuk, Zhob and Duki districts of Balochistan.
The five-year programme was funded by the European Union and implemented by Rural Support Programmes Network (RSPN), Balochistan Rural Support Programme (BRSP) and National Rural Support Programmes (NRSP) in collaboration with the provincial government.
The scheme was launched in June 2017 and completed in June 2022. The European Union, the donor of this Rs3.77 billion programme, also engaged a technical assistance partner DAI-Human Dynamics (DAI-HD), a leading international company, to enable the Balochistan government to foster an enabling environment for strengthening the capacities of local authorities to manage and involve communities in the statutory local public sector planning, financing and implementation processes.
Through the programme, 300,000 poor rural households in 257 union councils have been mobilised and organised into a network of people’s own institutions including 19,129 community organisations (COs), 3,085 village organisations (VOs), 243 local support organisations (LSOs) and 33 LSO networks at tehsil and district level.
The data said that support was provided to the organisations to improve the lives and livelihoods of the households as well as to foster linkages between the community institutions and local governments to improve basic service delivery.
The programme also had a public finance management team, which worked closely with DAI-HD to assist the provincial government in costing and funding the community-led development policy framework through clearly defined fiscal and regulatory frameworks, budgetary processes and commitments reflected in a multi-annual budgetary framework and defined institutional arrangements.
The programme was meant to enable the rural people to implement community-driven socioeconomic development interventions and influence policy decision-making through active engagement with local authorities for quality, inclusive and equitable service delivery.
The objective of the programme was to support the Balochistan government in reducing the negative impact of economic deprivation, poverty and social inequality, environmental degradation and climate change.
The data shows that the residents of Balochistan have suffered disproportionately as compared to the people of other regions of the country owing to weak policies, poor governance, the geopolitical situation, and the huge presence of Afghan refugees in the province besides rising militancy, security issues and abject poverty.
The programme also aims to minimise the negative impact of economic deprivation, poverty, social inequality, and environmental degradation, and to encourage and enable empowered resilient communities to participate more actively in identifying and implementing socio-economic development activities through an institutionalised partnership mechanism with local government authorities.
BRACE community-mobilisation and empowerment models have been devised to bring communities together around a common agenda. The mobilised and empowered community is the key to the sustainable socio-economic development of the rural population.
The programme supported the provincial government in reducing rural poverty in nine districts. It empowered 19,129 COs, 3,103 VOs, 249 LSOs and 31 tehsil-level and nine district-level LSO networks.
The BRACE technical assistance supported the Balochistan government to develop a community-driven policy and fiscal framework for local governments and rural development sectors. The framework clarifies the complementary roles to be played by local governments, RSPs and development partners committed to poverty alleviation through community empowerment.
To enable the local government departments of Balochistan, a strategic policy and fiscal framework is being developed. It includes strengthening institutional and PFM capacity that will facilitate further scaling up of the programme to cover the entire province with increased support of the development partners.
Renowned development expert and the chairman of the Rural Support Programme, Shoaib Sultan Khan, said that the programme was implemented in nine districts.
“DAI-HD is providing technical assistance to the overall programme with a focus on strategic work for community-led local development policy development,” he told WealthPK.
