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Enhancing Poverty Reduction Strategies and National Plans

This summary provides an overview of the first day proceedings of the East Asia Forum on National Plans as Poverty Reduction Strategies. It highlights the importance of transparency, participation, poverty focus, results-orientation, aid alignment, and harmonization in developing and implementing poverty reduction strategies. The presentation emphasizes the need for effective communication campaigns, fiscal transparency, increased participation from civil society, pro-poor policy interventions, sector strategies and budgets, setting targets and indicators, monitoring and evaluation systems, and aligning aid cycles and reporting procedures.

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Enhancing Poverty Reduction Strategies and National Plans

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  1. DEVELOPING AND IMPLEMENTING POVERTY REDUCTION STRATEGIES AND NATIONAL PLANSA Summary of First Day Proceedings East Asia Forum on National Plans as Poverty Reduction Strategies Vientiane, Lao PDR April 4-6, 2006

  2. Overview of the Presentation • Some highlights from parallel sessions on: • Transparency and participation • Poverty focus • Results-orientation • Aid alignment and harmonization

  3. Transparency and communications—lessons from PRSPs for National Plans • Importance of communications campaigns in disseminating PRSs—Use of: • Media—press, TV, radio • Summarized versions in local languages • The web • Importance of going to rural, remote, poor areas

  4. Fiscal Transparency • More fiscally transparent countries have better credit ratings, better fiscal discipline and corruption • Importance of publishing timely and comprehensive: • Budget plans • Budgets • Executed budgets • Final accounts

  5. Participation • PRSPs broke new ground in increasing participation in planning processes from civil society at all stages: • Diagnosis • Planning • Implementation • Monitoring and evaluation

  6. Participation • There were also interesting experiences in local level participatory planning • Sectoral working groups a key tool for continued participation in implementation and M&E phases • The challenge is to draw lessons from PRSP processes for national plans

  7. Poverty Focus • Pro-poor policy interventions identified through diagnostics and participatory processes • Poverty alleviation efforts can be scaled up by: • engaging civil society in the task and • allowing the private sector to thrive

  8. Poverty Focus • Recipe for economic development and poverty reduction: • High and stable economic growth • Sound macro and structural policies • Make poverty reduction a key priority • Encourage participation • Expand education, health and other services in rural and remote areas • Make good use of financial resources and knowledge/skills from multilateral and bilateral donors

  9. Links to sector strategies and budgets • Choose priority sectors and cross-sectoral areas and stick to them over time • Ensure proper funding for priority sectors/issues • Invest in poorer geographical areas

  10. Links to sector strategies and budgets • Truly prioritizing a sector through policy and budget allocations can achieve impressive results in a short time-frame • Critical importance of ensuring coherence between plans, PIPs, MTFFs, sector strategies and budgets • Challenges of decentralization in ensuring policy coherence and pro-poor focus

  11. Results—Setting Targets and Indicators • Tailor MDGs to national context • Have political buy-in into goals, e.g. Parliamentary approval • May need to localize MDGs • Indicators should be SMART (simple, measurable, accurate, reliable, timely)

  12. Results—Setting Targets and Indicators • Targets and indicators should be linked to public actions • Institutional responsibilities for monitoring should be assigned • Need a complementary/supportive monitoring and evaluation system • Keep in mind institutional environment and capacity

  13. Monitoring and Evaluation Systems • Importance of establishing a results chain: inputs-outputs-outcomes-impacts • Statistical master plans as an example of how to think strategically and systematically on data needs • Building sound systems for monitoring administrative data • Program evaluations can lead to correcting policies and making them more pro-poor

  14. Aid Alignment • Challenge for alignment—different and changing donor priorities • Advantages of SWAP—medium-term planning with donor resource backing • Advantages of collaborative assistance strategies—savings, shared analysis, trust-building, donor alignment

  15. Harmonizing aid cycles and reporting procedures • Usefulness of setting planning and budget cycles and aligning donor reporting cycles to these national processes • Reporting on aid disbursements remains weak • Recipient countries are concerned about the cost and weak knowledge transfer of technical assistance

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