Project Objective: is to sustainably increase the incomes and enhance the livelihoods of the rural poor fisherfolks families and agricultural households in the project area.
Relationship with Sector Objectives: Pakistan Vision 2025 aims to halve the poverty by 2025 and attain upper middle-income status for the country. This is premised on economic growth, a knowledge economy, social justice and protection and universal access to quality social services. Vision 2025 also articulates the government’s commitment to attain SDG goals in terms of poverty reduction, education, gender equality, women health, mother and child health, and environmental sustainability. Ministry of National Food Security and Research issued a National Food Security Policy in 2014 which aims to achieve an average growth rate of 4 per cent for the agriculture sector.
Social Protection and Poverty Graduation: Government’s poverty graduation strategy calls for partnerships with rural support programmes and NGOs, to help poor households graduate out of poverty. Ministry for Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation has launched a national poverty graduation programme “Ehsaas”. A number of poverty graduation models, approaches and programmes have been tested and experience allows for pursuit and scaling up of best practices for effective poverty graduation by multi-sector participatory development projects like GLLSP II.
Gender and Youth: The Government of Balochistan established the Women Development Department in 2009 also approved a ‘Gender Equality Policy’ in May 2013 to enhance women’s social, political, legal and economic status. This was followed by a Strategic Action Plan 2016–2020. Providing youth with skills has been declared a national priority and a national skills development programme for youth from low income and poor families, and an interest-free loan scheme “Kamyab Jawan” have been launched to help unemployed youth start their own businesses.
Coastal Area Development Policy: The Government of Balochistan has issued a policy for the development of the coastal areas and the sustainable management and development of fisheries. The Coastal Area development plan complements the infrastructure developments taking place under the CPEC/BRI project. Five new jetties are being developed for fish landing among the eight officially notified landing sites. A new Act to promote Fisherfolks’s Cooperatives is also being finalized.
Climate change. There is a growing recognition of the challenges and importance of environmental considerations. The project area is prone to climate change effects including erratic rains, droughts, raising temperature, rising sea levels, sedimentation of the landing sites and environmental degradation. As a result, the farming systems and fisheries have been impacted by lower productivity, crop failures, declining livestock and decrease in fish catch warranting on one hand a climate resilient agriculture and livestock, and on the other a sustainable fisheries management. There is need for both policy reform and enforcement of existing regulations at provincial and sub-provincial levels with regards to sustainable fisheries management, protecting biodiversity and adaptable rural development with effective mitigation efforts to manage the impact of environmental degradation and climate change.
