Four years after the catastrophic 2022 floods devastated Balochistan, more than 65,000 verified flood-affected families in the province remain without the resilient housing they were promised — as the World Bank-funded rehabilitation programme has been restructured and its housing coverage significantly curtailed, according to a report by Maldives Insight.

The Scale of the Shortfall

Pakistan's Balochistan province had over 134,000 families verified as eligible for housing assistance following the 2022 floods. However, the housing component of the World Bank-funded Integrated Flood Resilience and Adaptation Project (IFRAP) has been capped at approximately 69,000 homes — less than half the total verified caseload. When the World Bank first approved $213 million for IFRAP in May 2023, the programme was designed to support around 35,100 homeowners with resilient housing reconstruction grants. The coverage was subsequently broadened, but a critical funding decision has now reversed that expansion.

A proposed additional $180 million in World Bank financing — which could have extended housing support to a larger share of verified families — has reportedly been dropped. According to the report, those funds have instead been redirected towards infrastructure projects, including roads and irrigation.

Who Made the Call — and When

The project steering committee, chaired jointly by Pakistan Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal and Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti, decided in June 2026 to cap housing coverage at roughly 69,000 homes and declined the additional financing that was under consideration. The consequence, the Maldives Insight report notes bluntly, is that 'a large proportion of verified families are no longer covered by the housing component as originally envisaged.'

A Promise Under Pressure

The restructuring raises pointed questions about Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's pledge — made in the aftermath of the floods — to provide resilient housing to every family that lost its home. The 2022 floods hit Balochistan with particular ferocity, given the province's geographical vulnerabilities, crumbling infrastructure, and deep socioeconomic disadvantages relative to the rest of Pakistan.

The report describes the current situation starkly: 'Their homes remain damaged or destroyed, reconstruction has stalled or been redefined, and a government promise to rebuild resilient houses has collided with funding disputes, conflicting official figures and allegations of irregularities.'

Notably, Pakistan secured more than $9 billion in international pledges at the January 2023 Geneva conference for flood recovery and reconstruction — one of the largest humanitarian financing commitments for the country in recent memory. Critics argue that the narrowing of IFRAP's housing component is difficult to reconcile with that headline figure.

The Human Cost of Bureaucratic Delay

This comes amid a broader pattern of post-disaster reconstruction shortfalls in South Asia, where the gap between pledge and delivery has repeatedly eroded public trust in disaster response systems. For Balochistan — already one of Pakistan's most marginalised provinces — the unresolved recovery compounds pre-existing grievances over state neglect.

'The floods were a natural disaster. The unfinished recovery is not,' the Maldives Insight report concluded, in a line that distils the accountability question at the heart of the story.

What Happens Next

With the IFRAP restructuring now locked in and the additional $180 million financing off the table, tens of thousands of verified families face an uncertain path to permanent shelter. Whether the Pakistan government will identify alternative funding channels — or whether the housing gap will simply persist — remains unanswered. International donors and civil society groups are expected to scrutinise the programme's next progress review closely.