Baluchistan Integrated Village Rehabilitation Project

The August 2010 flooding in the Indus River Valley was a direct result of torrential monsoon rains. However the flooding became a disaster in Sindh and southeast Baluchistan as a result of human actions – the breaching of embankments, inundating the villages where Islamic Relief Pakistan (IRP) carried out its integrated programme of water, sanitation and hygiene, housing reconstruction and livelihoods restoration. IRP implemented a successful programme under difficult circumstances in a complex environment. Baluchistan is an area of conflict, where attacks on vehicles and kidnapping for ransom are commonplace, and where summer temperatures reach 50 degrees C. Start-up was delayed for more than three months by newly-implemented government procedures for registering organisations, negotiating MOUs and issuing No Objection Certificates. IRP’s principled insistence on community-based beneficiary selection processes undoubtedly extended this delay and continued to cause friction with the District Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) throughout the implementation period. The project, for the most part, delivered tangible outputs: houses, sewing machines, seed, irrigation channels and training. The physical outputs, especially housing, are of high quality for Jaffarabad but in the evaluator’s opinion the health and WASH training were probably too short in duration and too thinly spread to have a measurable impact.