ISLAMABAD, Jan 19: A national body was created on Saturday for augmenting human resource development to focus on, and provide input for, primary education and health sectors, besides poverty alleviation.

The decision to this effect was announced by President Gen Pervez Musharraf at a meeting of the Task Force on Human Resource Development, held at the Chief Executive Secretariat.

Dr Nasim Ashraf, chairman of the newly-formed body, briefing the newsmen, said national human resource development centres would be set up in all the districts, at a grassroots level, in a phased manner.

Besides, he said, different projects would be undertaken to augment the policies of the government regarding primary education by opening up literacy centres.

He said the president emphasised the need for devising an effective strategy to give top priority to education and health sectors, and quoted him as saying: “Human development is the anchor of my economic revival policy which will focus on education, health and poverty alleviation through skills training and micro-credit programmes.”

Dr Ashraf said because of these programmes people would be imparted training in different skills and then get the credit to start their own business at a small level.

A national literacy programme, he added, would also be undertaken which would be linked to training skills in micro enterprise. It would help create 200,000 new small businesses during the next three years in 14 districts in a phased manner all over the country and would rapidly expand.

The most important decision taken in the meeting, he stressed, was setting up of a National Pakistan Trust Fund which would be a public-private sector partnership. The president would be the patron of the Fund which would be an independent body, comprising individuals from the civil society and corporate sector and representatives of government ministries, including the ministry of finance.

He said the government was putting in some endowment money for the Fund while Rs100 million had already been raised as seed money by 15 individuals, mostly overseas Pakistanis.

He said the report of the President’s Task Force on Human Resource Development was presented in the meeting.

The report focused on three areas and the biggest issue that came out was lack of capacity and management in all areas. Therefore, “our issues were related to management, governance and capacity, more than the issues merely of money.”—APP