With vast parts of Pakistan still digging out from last week’s earthquake, donors are already planning a massive reconstruction effort that will require billions of dollars over five to 10 years, United Nations and British officials said on Friday.
Northern Pakistan will need everything from hundreds of rebuilt medical clinics and schools to a whole new network of roads, which are still so torn apart that an untold number of desperate survivors remain out of aid’s way.
“It will take billions of dollars to rebuild,” UN relief chief Jan Egeland said after a two-day visit to see the destruction first-hand.
“To reconstruct this will take five to 10 years,” he told a press conference in Islamabad.
But so far, even the immediate needs — such as tens of thousands of tents — have gone unmet for survivors of last Saturday’s earthquake, which left more than 25 000 dead, 63 000 injured and 2,5-million homeless in Pakistan alone.
Egeland called for more aid from the international community, saying only $50-million have been pledged of the $272-million the UN asked for on Tuesday to provide immediate assistance.
“This is a good start, but it is not enough. We need more money from more nations,” Egeland said.
Pakistan says it has been pledged about $360-million in aid, although much of this is in long-term commitment rather than for the UN’s so-called “flash appeal”. Egeland said the UN has overall commitments of $225-million.
British diplomat Yusaf Samiullah said international donors such as the World Bank, Britain and Japan will form a team of experts to come up with a detailed proposal to Pakistan’s government on how to rebuild.
“This thinking about reconstruction has already started and it will be done alongside the relief efforts … to help people survive the winter,” said Samiullah, stationed at the British embassy in Islamabad with the Department for International Development.
He told reporters the UN appeal for $272-million, launched on Tuesday, is a stop-gap measure for short- to medium-term relief and a subsequent appeal for reconstruction funds will involve a “much larger number”.
“This much larger number will be clear in about four to five weeks because the expert teams will have much more detailed calculations,” Samiullah said.
Egeland also said the immediate appeal will likely be upped.
He said he is urging the world “to think of how much it takes to get a roof for more than one million people in the space of days and weeks. We need tens of thousands of more tents,” Egeland said.
“I am overall fairly optimistic. I think in the next week we will have a much bigger relief effort.
“But we must not forget the people who will be spending their seventh night tonight — they should not need to spend an eighth or ninth night in cold and colder climate,” he said.
The Norwegian diplomat became the public face of relief efforts after December’s Indian Ocean tsunami when he derided wealthy nations as “stingy” in their aid pledging.
He said that while the death toll from the earthquake will be much lower than the hundreds of thousands killed in the tsunami, it is much more difficult to reach survivors in the mountains than it was on the ocean coasts.
“An earthquake in the Himalayan mountains a short time before winter is in many cases a complete logistical nightmare,” Egeland said. — AFP