An article was published in some section of the media on 12.3.2023 bearing the title “FBR project gets poor rating from lender”. The piece is factually incorrect on numerous accounts and quotes statistics without proper context which makes it misleading.
To begin with, the very title of the article is misleading in that the article itself states that the World Bank had accorded “moderately satisfactory” rating to the Pakistan Raises Revenue Program, whereas the title calls it “poor” – a rating which does not even exist in World Bank’s project performance ratings code book. It is pertinent to mention that this code book has six categories in the rating scale and “moderately satisfactory” is at number three on this scale.
The article, in clear contradiction to its own title, goes on to admit that “the World Bank has kept overall project development objective rating at “satisfactory”.
Another example of this glaring and out of context reporting is that the “moderately satisfactory” rating was accorded to the smaller component-II of the PRR Program which is only worth $80 M out of the total Program size of $400 M.
As per the World Bank’s Aide Memoire “overall, the progress on Component 1 is satisfactory and improving”.
Important to note that Component 1 is worth $320 M and thus makes 80% of the total $400 M PRR Program.
The author didn’t track the progress that took place since World Bank completed its Medium Term Review (MTR) mission in October & November 2022 and based his story on stale data.
FBR was able to successfully complete a host of DLI based policy actions under Component 1 that led to additional disbursement of $41.568 M in February 2023, bringing total disbursement to $ 250 M i.e. 62% of the total Program size and, to be correct on disbursement design, 78% of Component 1 allocation. The article, on the other hand, reported the old disbursement figure of $210 M under Component 1.—PR
