When it was announced, the World Bank’s Solid Waste Emergency and Efficiency Project (Sweep) was touted as one of the lifelines that would help Pakistan’s biggest city, Karachi, with its urban flooding nightmare. But that hasn’t happened.

Flooding returned stronger every year since, upending the city in both 2021 and 2022. “We never know what kind of damage to expect when it rains,” said Razia Sunny, who lives by one of Karachi’s nullahs – narrow channels that drain wastewater from the city to the sea.

“Residents here have gotten sick because of the waste flooding into our homes during urban flooding, we’ve even had people slip and fall [into the nullahs],” Imran Gill, another resident of the informal settlement, told Climate Home News.

Since 2017, the World Bank has poured millions of dollars into Karachi. The city, population 16 million, is the backbone of Pakistan’s economy. But come monsoon season much of the city is submerged – not least during the extreme flooding of 2022.

A major problem is trash clogging the nullahs, so stormwater overflows. Sweep was supposed to help by improving solid waste management, but two years into the five-year project, there is no sign of progress. Less than 3% of its $100 million budget has been spent, and none of it on new infrastructure.

Slum clearance

Project officials took the promise of funding as a cue to clear slums alongside the waterways. The provincial authority demolished thousands of homes without, residents say, any consultation or plan to find them somewhere else to live.

Climate Home reviewed dozens of official documents, interviewed officials inside the projects and visited the sites affected by flooding. In the sites near Karachi’s sewage infrastructure, Climate Home found several cases where residents of informal housing got injured or even died during extreme floods in 2020 and 2022.

When human rights organisations raised concerns about the demolitions, the World Bank distanced itself from the project.

Government officials insist things are not going too badly. “We’re only delayed by three or fourth months,” Sweep director Zubair Channa said.

The World Bank seemingly agrees: its project reports in March 2021 and November 2021 declared progress “satisfactory”, even though no work had been completed on the ground. This rating changed to “moderately satisfactory” for both the June 2022 and December 2022 reports, after further inaction.

In response to Climate Home’s request for comment, the World Bank defended the project and said the consultancy was “fairly advanced and expected to deliver their outputs soon”.

“Based on the current schedule, we expect the construction of the waste disposal facility and transfer stations to commence in early 2023,” said the bank’s press office.

This is a climate adaptation issue. Global heating “likely increased” the intensity of monsoon rains in 2022, when flooding hit 33 million people across the country, an international group of scientists found. More extreme events are expected under a 2C warming scenario.

The money trail

So what has happened to the promised funding? The money comes in the form of loans to the provincial government of Sindh.

Among a few feasibility studies and some operational costs, documents show the authorities have so far spent $91,891 (which at the time was converted to almost PKR 16 million) on furniture. An official source associated with Sweep, who asked not to be named, said the number was too high and seemed out of place.

“We’re a poor country; we can’t afford to spend like this on operational costs, not when that money will be paid back by citizens who already can’t afford it,” said architect and urban planner Dr Noman Ahmed, chairperson of Department of Architecture and Planning at the NED University Karachi.

The Sindh Government’s procurement plan earmarks $8 million for equipment ranging from bins to waste collection vehicles. Another $30 million is destined for implementation “works”. This money has yet to be disbursed.

On all aspects of these expenses, bank oversight is meant to come once the project is concluded. Yet related projects raise red flags.

In November, the Sindh High Court barred the provincial government from awarding any more contracts under the World Bank’s Competitive and Liveable City of Karachi (Click) project, citing a lack of transparency over where the money was going.

Fahad Saeed, South Asia and Middle East lead at the policy NGO Climate Analytics, said: “Pakistan needs to do some introspection as to why they were unable to tap into the funds that were available. Was their own house in order to access these funds?”

In 2021, the world’s governments agreed at COP26 to double the amount of international adaptation finance by 2025, which stands at around $20 billion per year.

Why does Karachi flood?

Decades of neglect in Karachi’s sewage and waste disposal systems created the perfect recipe for flooding in the city. Every year, come monsoon season, the city’s debilitated drainage system clogs and water overflows.

More than 6 million people in Karachi live in informal settlements, many of which have encroached the city’s nullahs – the riverbeds that carry waste from one end of the city all the way to the sea.

These populations are the first victims of urban flooding, and also major contributors to the problem.

“In 2019, when the Sindh Government took the issue to the World Bank, we realised that there was a serious requirement to clean the nullahs once or twice a year,” Sweep director Channa told Climate Home News.

After bad urban flooding in 2020, the Sindh Government reached out to the World Bank to speed up the cleaning of nullahs. “We asked to be allowed to work and they agreed, so despite Sweep not having been signed yet work began, and we were to get the money back through retroactive funding,” Channa said.

The World Bank announced the decision to finance these efforts in December 2020, saying they would “improve solid waste management services in Karachi” and “upgrade critical solid waste infrastructure”. This would help to reduce floods “especially in vulnerable communities around drainage and waste collection sites.”

The reality on the ground was different.

Destroyed homes

Instead of protecting the vulnerable, the provincial authorities started by bulldozing homes that had been built without planning permission.

The World Bank denied responsibility. “There were meetings between civilians and WB officials, who claimed to us that they had never sanctioned any encroachment removal,” Zahid Farooq, sen