Mockery of two emergency health projects

It's disconcerting to know that the government has been able to utilise only around 15 percent of funds allocated for two Covid emergency response projects, and now faces a near-impossible race against time with the fund utilisation deadline ending in June 2023. The two projects—one titled "Covid-19 Emergency Response and Pandemic Preparedness Project" and another titled "Covid-19 Response Emergency Assistance"—were adopted in 2020 to contain the pandemic. Of the combined funds of Tk 8,150 crore allocated for them, approximately Tk 6,970 crore (USD 800 million) was committed by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to support Bangladesh in testing and treating Covid cases, purchasing vaccine and strengthening its public healthcare capacity to respond to emergencies.

Over the last two years, however, the authorities struggled to use the money even while the country suffered through wave after wave of the pandemic, with hospitals often unable to accommodate patients or give them proper treatment, resulting in significant losses of lives. What could be the justification for that? Fund utilisation, according to experts, slowed down amid allegations of corruption in purchasing healthcare equipment and the lack of capacity of health officials in implementing projects. In the case of vaccines, the government couldn't use the funds due to the scarcity of jabs and the conditions from financiers to procure only vaccines approved by the World Health Organization (WHO). Using the funds properly may still strengthen our healthcare system by supporting the ongoing efforts, but those funds were primarily meant to meet the needs of a particular crisis period, and our failure to do so has been very expensive, to say the least.

If this is the fate of projects with "emergency" in their titles, one dreads to think what happens to non-emergency projects in a climate of zero accountability. Public projects in Bangladesh, unfortunately, suffer from a culture of deliberate time and cost overruns, resulting in frequent revisions. Forget the additional cost that it causes. Delays at every stage of the implementation of a project mean that the promised benefits risk being compromised or cancelled by the time a project is finished, making a mockery of its stated objectives. And we have rarely—if ever—seen project officials and other stakeholders involved in delayed undertakings being held to account.

This is especially troubling when it happens in the health sector. The authorities—because they deal with public life—must answer for their failure to properly and timely utilise these emergency funds. And they must ensure the same doesn't happen going forward.