Governments are always under pressure to deliver, and rightly so. However, since the merger of Pakistan’s former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) with the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in May 2018, the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has faced the additional imperative of delivering to address and begin to rectify the legacy of ex-FATA’s unequal development. Confronted with this challenge, the careful selection and prioritization of development projects in which the government will invest resources has only become more important.

Pakistan’s traditional planning process for development projects focuses primarily at the level of individual projects. To strengthen the linkages between individual projects and desired sector-wide outcomes, and to support a more rigorous approach to key decisions about which projects to fund, the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is implementing a new planning tool – the Programming Approaches/Analytics and Measures Framework (PAMframe).