Meeting with IFAD Mission on AJ&K-CD Project

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The Government of AJ&K has implemented AJ&K Community Development Project with financial assistance of International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) in recent past. Keeping in view the successful implementation of the project, GoAJ&K and IFAD decided to launch a follow-up project to institutionalize the community driven development (CDD) approach in AJ&K. To design the project an IFAD mission headed by Mr. Hubert Boirard (CPM) visited Muzaffarabad on April 27, 2017. Other member of mission were Mr. Qaim Shah, Senior Country Manager/Team Lead, IFAD, Mr. Rab Nawaz, Institutions, Management and Poverty Specialist and other officials. the Mission had detail discussion with Planning & Development Department and later on with different government line departments. The Mission had an exclusive session with LG&RDD, the main purpose of which was to analyze the capacity of the department and to have an overview of local government system which is planned to be in place by ending of the calendar year.

As per the initial discussion with Mission, The Programme will cover all 10 districts of AJK. Target group will comprise those households falling within the National Poverty Scorecard band range of 0-34, of which there are approximately 326,904 households, and representing over 50% of the population. Priority will be given to the poorest Union Councils (UCs). UCs with over 1,000 hhs in the poverty band of 0-34 will be eligible for programme interventions.

At least 50% of the Community Organizations (COs) will be women COs while all VOs will be mixed VOs with 50 per cent representation given to women. Women-headed households and ultra-poor women will be specifically targeted for graduation and asset creation. For the two major funding allocations under (i) assets for ultra-poor graduation and (ii) Community Physical Infrastructure (CPIs), the distribution of resources among the ten districts will be on the basis of a multi-factor criteria involving weighted average of population (70%), area (10%) and poverty (20%). Equitable allocation within the District, amongst the priority eligible LSOs, and by LSOs amongst COs, will be determined by the District Planning Office/District Coordination Committee. The total cost of the program would be aprox. US$132.36 million and the span of project would be about 06 years.