Pakistan following development plans despite challenges, says Iqbal

Reiterating Pakistan’s resilience before the international community, Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal on Saturday presented the Pakistan's Voluntary National Review (VNR) on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the United Nations' High Level Political Forum (HLPG) 2022 and termed

While presenting the VNR during the 15th meeting of the ministerial segment of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC 2022) at the UN in New York, the minister said, "We are a nation of young people. 64 percent of the population is below the age of 30. The youth of Pakistan need good and quality education, and skills to achieve sustainable development for a better Pakistan.”

He said that despite having formidable global and national challenges, Pakistan followed its development plans in partnership with the international community and local stakeholders.

This year's VNR report contains localisation efforts and innovation in partnership with other different stakeholders, response and recovery from Covid-19 and the way forward in the light of lessons learned to build forward better in the decade of action.

Iqbal presented the Vision 2025 alignment with the SDGs. He said that the SDGs were strategically aligned with the National Vision 2025. "Each pillar is uniquely associated with different SDGs,” he said.

On the policy enabling environment, the minister said that the SDGs were adopted as a national development agenda through a unanimous National Assembly (NA) resolution in 2016.

"Soon after, we have established specialised seven SDGs support units at the federal, provincial and special areas to mainstream and localise SDGs," he said.

On the transformation from the last VNR, the minister said that in the last three years Pakistan had its first SDGs Status Report 2021.

"Development projects are SDGs integrated, data quality is improving, and we are harmonising the data and survey instruments are being standardised," he said, adding that the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) had a latest National Socio-Economic Registry that geo-tagged all out of school children.

"Pakistan SDGs Index is developed to monitor the progress at goal level and overall; it shows 10 percentage points improve from 2015-2020,” he further said.

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Regarding Pakistan’s Covid-19 strategy, Iqbal said, "We have followed a three-pronged strategy, i.e., policy of saving lives, livelihood and salvaging economy. For this purpose, smart lockdowns were proposed which was an effective policy.

In addition to a stimulus package, he said, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) also announced a package for business to keep the economy on toes, however, the impact of Covid-19 was unknown to all.

“Post pandemic economic growth showed a V-shaped recovery with GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita increasing by 13.4 percent,” he added.

The minister said that for higher and stable growth "we are focusing on the provision of education and skills to youth, jobs creation, public infrastructure investment through public-private partnership (PPP), special focus on China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and digitisation of the economy.

Iqbal said that a special helpline 1099 was created for legal advice on human rights at federal and provincial levels as well as a Child Protection Helpline 1121 for the protection of children. Similarly, he said, special laws were enacted for the protection of the vulnerable such as the Zainab Alert, Response; Recovery Act, 2020; Islamabad Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2020.

He further said that due to the free float of the exchange rate Pakistan is facing double-digit inflation.

"The IMF's (International Monetary Fund) conditions on top of that were so hard that it was difficult to provide relief to a common person,” he remarked.

During Covid-19, the minister said, the developed countries were there to help the developing countries. "But this is also a super shock and globally no one comes forward to ease out the developing countries," he added.

He further called on the UN to champion the issue of countries facing extreme economic shocks due to the doubling and tripling of commodity prices in international markets.