ISLAMABAD-Central Development Working Party (CDWP) on Wednesday approved two mega projects worth of Rs 8.175 billion to support education system under COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting of the committee was chaired by Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Mohammad Jehanzeb Khan and was attended by senior officials from Planning Commission and federal ministries/divisions. Ministry of Federal Education & Professional Training presented two mega projects in CDWP meeting. The CDWP approved a project titled “Pandemic Response Effectiveness Project (PREP) for COVID-19” worth Rs4.87 billion. The completion period project would be 24 months and the objective of this project is to prepare and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in Pakistan to address significant disruptive impact that keep children, teachers and administrators out of school for prolonged period.
The project will focus on supporting schools and parents in distance learning activities, remote learning from Tv/radio broadcast, virtual network and support policy changes and their implementation to increase the capacity of the education system to deal with future emergencies that contribute to school closures. The meeting also approved another project namely “Response Recovery Resilience in Education Programming during COVID-19 by the Pakistan” worth Rs3.3 billion. The completion period of this project would be 20 months which would support short and medium term response and recovery needs under the COVID-9 pandemic, while establishing the technical and institutional capacity to build back a stronger and more resilience education system, with a focus on disadvantaged population in lagging areas in all provinces.