Ahead of the SAARC Summit in Islamabad, it is business as usual for the regional grouping.
The Union Finance Ministry has posted a call for applications for economy, infrastructure and social development posts in the “umbrella financial mechanism” for the region’s projects and programmes, the SAARC Development Fund.
The openings include the jobs of the Directors of the Fund’s three funding windows: Social, Economic and Infrastructure.
Thimphu SecretariatThe Ministry posted the openings on its website. They will be located in the Fund’s Secretariat in Thimphu, Bhutan.
The Fund’s Economic and Infrastructure windows are in the process of being operationalised. Bankable projects for lending in the region are under evaluation.
The Economic Window is expected to extend funding to non-infrastructural projects related to areas such as trade and industrial development and agriculture. It is also to be utilised for identifying, studying, developing and sponsoring commercially viable programmes and projects of regional priority.
Under the Social window, the Fund is already implementing ten regional projects. The focus of most of these projects is on poverty alleviation, education; health; human resources development; support to the disadvantaged; funding needs of communities, mirco-enterprises and rural infrastructure development.
The social projects are being implemented by a total of 62 agencies covering all the eight Member States. Of its $70.27 million commitments to projects in the Social Window, the Fund had disbursed by mid-April this year $38.38 million.
The Infrastructure Window will finance projects in areas such as energy, power, transportation, telecommunications, environment, tourism and other infrastructure sectors.
Climate, energyAmong the projects in the pipeline is a four-year (2013 – 2017) programme for the implementation of climate and energy use component of HCFC Phase-out Management Plan (HPMP) in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Of its total budget of $9,479,360, the Fund will provide $4,452,000. The programme is expected to result in GHG emission mitigation of around 5.5 million tons of CO2-eq annually and 5700 million KWh of energy savings during 2012-2015.
