Report reveals Pak rural-urban divide

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s rural areas remain poorer than urban centres and are far more disadvantaged in all aspects, a World Bank report on poverty has said.

Balochistan has the highest rural poverty rate, with more than 62% living below the poverty line, said the report titled ‘State of Water Supply, Sanitation and Poverty in Pakistan’. The gap between rural and urban poverty is the widest in Sindh at almost 30%. In Punjab and KhyberPakhtunkhwa, it is at 13 and 15% respectively.

The report said the poverty head count rate in rural Pakistan was twice that of urban areas — 36% to 18%— a difference that remained unchanged since 2001. Combined with the slow pace of urbanisation—only about 35% of Pakistanis lived in urban areas in 2014 — this gap indicated that about 80% of poor population lives only in the rural areas.

Rural children are 8.5 percentage points less likely than urban counterparts to have adequate immunisation by three years of age, the report said. Rural women are 10 percentage points less likely to receive prenatal care, 28 percentage points less likely to give birth in a facility or hospital, and 12 percentage points less likely to receive postnatal care.

Rural households are 15 percentage points less likely to have an electricity connection and 63 percentage points less likely to have a natural gas connection than urban households.

The report noted that districts varied widely in poverty. The vast majority of the 40 poorest districts were in Balochistan, followed by Sindh.