Source: ISODEC
To qualify for the IMF’s Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) and assistance from the soft-loan window of the World Bank (the IDA) or the Regional Development Bank, Ghana was required to prepare a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). After some hurried preparation, the IMF and World Bank boards gave their blessing to the document in February 2001 as part of the process in reaching the HIPC decision point.
The paper concludes that the PRSP process in Ghana and the development of the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy has generally been participatory and country-generated. However, this was done within the conditions laid down by the donor community for preparing PRSPs. As such, policies such as privatization and full cost recovery of utility services and basic social services as well as full trade liberalization have not been reviewed in spite of general dissatisfaction from the majority of Ghanaians. If poverty is to be reduced in this atmosphere then it is necessary to put in place social safety nets to assist poor households to maintain minimum consumption levels and access to basic social services.
Funding is the major constraint of the GPRS as resources generated internally are grossly inadequate while foreign debt has become unsustainable. The government has tied its hands further by committing to the condition that the funding should not be inflationary (monetary policies), should not lead to an unsustainable debt overhang (external borrowing), and should not lead to the crowding out of the private sector (domestic borrowing). No matter how beautiful the programmes are they will remain on the drawing board if we don’t get the necessary funding. This calls for a more efficient use of all resources at our disposal. The HIPC resources (if we get them) must be used to support the programmes in the GPRS. The Poverty Fund that is created should be open to public scrutiny, as past experience has shown that such funds can easily be diverted for political purposes. Local government
authorities must be given more resources, but with the necessary capacity, to implement poverty reducing programmes and projects with civil society oversight. For the tracking of poverty reducing expenditures, transparency is a necessary prescription and the involvement of all and sundry is a basic requirement for success in the implementation of the GPRS.
However, even before the GPRS has taken off, another initiative, the New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) is underway and has already been hailed as the solution to Africa’s problems: good social amenities, strengthened infrastructure base, information and technological advancement and efficient and reliable but affordable energy to spearhead growth in 2025. It remains to be seen whether the GPRS is another of those policy initiatives that have yielded no results for Ghana or there is going to be a change this time.
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Source: ISODEC
A progress report on the GPRS process issued by the Task Force for the GPRS in December 2000 acknowledged monitoring and evaluation as a key part of the design of the GPRS and promised that attention will be paid to defining processes or collection, analysis and management of data on poverty alongside key outcome and intermediate indicators (Task Force for the GPRS, Dec. 2000). However, to date there has been little progress in this area. Neither the Technical armonization Workshop Report (April, 2000) nor the report f the workshop on the GPRS presented at the National Economic Dialogue Preparatory Workshop (May 2000) contain any treatment of the information and monitoring needs of the GPRS1 . Neither these reports nor the outstanding GPRS time table provide for a programme of work to fill this gap. There is also no oordinated donor initiatives either within the CDF or any other framework to tackle the monitoring problem. This paper looks at the ingredients of an effective monitoring system, the state of the Ghana Poverty Information System, Poverty Diagnosis and the use of information in the GPRS, GPRS Monitoring indicators, Impact Assessment in the GPRS, Linking plans and targets to resources, using institutional mechanism for the use of poverty data and donor initiatives and coordination.
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Source: ZNET
The article argues that Africa does not need more Western military intervention, more debt forgiveness or more Western philanthropy. What Africa needs is equal trade between nations and economic justice inside nations.
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Source: Centre for Policy Studies
How can democracy in South Africa best be promoted? And is oreign political aid assisting or weakening its promotion?
This paper seeks to contribute to an answer to these questions by examining the work of South Africa’s best-known democracy promotion organisation, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), and the role of foreign political aid in its activities. It seeks to understand IDASA’s strategy for democratisation, the notion of democracy that this implies, and the degree to which it corresponds to South Africa realities. It also discusses donor approaches to IDASA and the understanding of democracy and democratisation strategy these imply in the hope that this will help generate more effective strategies for building democracy among both donors and those they support.
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Source: Centre for Policy Studies
This paper presents the most significant findings of the third phase of the South African contribution to a study that has sought to research the impact of foreign political aid on CSOs and on democratisation in three African countries: South Africa, Ghana, and Uganda. It was conducted in partnership with the Institute for Development Studies of Sussex University in the United Kingdom; the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, Uganda; and the department of political science of the University of Ghana. This third phase consisted of detailed studies of a range of CSOs, more specifically their organisational capacity, their internal democratic processes and structures, and their political efficacy, understood as their ability to influence government policy and legislation for the benefit of their members and other social actors.
In each case, the study also attempted to assess the effect on the CSO of donor funding where it has been available, and where it has not, to analyse the effect thereof and the likely implications of it receiving donor funding. In order to derive conclusions about the effects of donor actions, the analysis was conducted at two levels. The first concerned the ‘outputs’ of donor interventions: are donors supporting, in appropriate ways, the types of CSOs and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are likely to contribute to democratic consolidation? The second relates to outcomes; what evidence is there that CSOs and NGOs supported by donors are making an active contribution through activities designed to influence government policy and law?
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Source: Actionaid International
Based on a 4 years of field research in Uganda, this report evaluates the relationship between NGOs and donor agencies. The study illustrates the complexity of the relationships between donors and recipients, and how far these shape behaviour and outcomes.
Main findings of the study include:
-there are tensions inherent in many grants and contracts between meeting set targets and the focus on impact while working to develop local organisations and processes are widely evident
-the policies, tools and procedures of aid management have an in-built bias towards tools and ways of thinking imported into Uganda from the donor countries
-donor agencies are in the driving seat most of the time - imposing donor or managerial ways of thinking and defining issues that may not be shared – or even understood- by local organisations or communities
-the tools and approaches also tend to simplify the complexity of doing development work with poor people in Africa: issues of inequality and poverty are over simplified, and more challenging issues such as ethnicity, the legacy of colonialism, the cultural norms around issues of age and gender are often overlooked altogether
-in realty development is much more ‘messy’ than in practice
-tensions exist where two or more very different organisational cultures work together, creating a lack of understanding, listening, and often suspicion at different levels
-there are, however, a few exceptions: a few NGOs work to a different paradigm, in spite of the difficulties in getting funding from the dominant donors in Uganda.
The paper points out, however, that there is also the potential of working differently within the current aid system. To realise this potential there needs to be a change in attitude:
-donor agencies need to be willing to listen and need to invest time for discussions and face to face meetings
donors and local NGOs need to work together on shared and negotiated planning, thereby developing mutual trust and confidence with regards to the implementation of the project
-advice and support should be given in an overall context of support rather than control
-more joint evaluations should be established allowing for learning, flexibility and openness
-while most development actors subscribe to the principles and values of participation in theory, they need to be properly implemented in practice.
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Source: SAPRN, ODI and FANRPAN
External donors have always been important to SADC. Donors work at both the national and regional level to support closer regional integration, in food security amongst other things.
Donors also often prefer region–wide programmes as they appear to offer more efficiency in aid programming than might be the case with a series of relatively small programmes with similar objectives agreed with individual national governments.
The net result is that SADC currently has a larger proportion of its expenditure sourced from donors and a larger number of individual donors than any similar regional organisation. This does create management challenges and SADC and a ‘donor group’ (consisting of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, UK, USA and the EU) meet regularly to ensure that decisions on aid support are informed by the best information available.
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Source: Reality of Aid
The 2006 Social Watch report has suggested the separation of bilateral and multilateral arrangement for development as a first step towards reforms for financial independence for poor countries.
The 262 page report prepared annually by a coalition of international Non-Governmental Organizations which was first launched in Singapore in September and relaunched recently in Ghana said "it is up to sovereign nations to enter into bilateral agreements on debt financing but these should be kept outside the multilateral system."
The report dubbed Impossible Architecture also suggested that consideration should be given to pooling and allocating aid through a development fund placed under the United Nations and run by a competent secretariat without day-to day interference from its contributors.
This according to the report means ceding the International Development Association IDA from the World Bank and the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PGRF) from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Though the amount involved is quite small, the report says the impact on the governance of these institutions could be important.
Already the European Union has announced its intention to create a trust fund to disburse European aid to Africa without depending on the World Bank. Their argument is that European money should be spent according to European policies and since their influence in the World Bank is not that much, they would like to disburse their own funds.
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Source: Malawi Economic Justice Network
This report assesses participation of Malawian Civil Society in the development of the Malawian Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS)
The report finds that the MGDS is a product of relatively lower levels of consultative and participatory processes, when compared with the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy (MPRS). While the MPRS and the Vision 2020 incorporated views and inputs from communities, the MGDS incorporated views of a smaller set of stakeholders. Civil society participation took place in the processes after key documents were already developed. One such key document was the Malawi Economic Growth Strategy (MEGS).
The MGDS has built on the MEGS. The MEGS emphasized the need to create a conducive environment for private sector investment to stimulate economic growth. Government conducted consultations with private sector only in the development of the MEGS. The MGDS also incorporates lessons learnt from the implementation of the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy (MPRS).
However, while the civil society actively participated in the MPRS annual reviews, the development of the MGDS was on average far ahead of the completion of the MPRS comprehensive review report and this raised the concern of time mismatches which was potentially undermining participation of the civil society. The MGDS has also been aligned with existing key sectoral strategies and policies from both private and public stakeholder institutions.
Government will spearhead the implementation of the MGDS. However, all stakeholders have varying responsibilities in the implementation process to ensure the attainment of the set goals. The civil society has established itself as one of the key players in monitoring implementation of national poverty policies and government budgets.
While the role of civil society in the implementation of the MGDS is appreciated, lack of adequate access to public information continues to hinder civil society efforts to meaningfully generate credible evidence for influencing policy dialogue. In addition, civil societies’ own inherent capacity weaknesses continue to slow down efforts for promoting pro-poor policy processes and content. These are also gaps and broken bridges that need urgent mending for civil society to become an effective vehicle for transforming public policy for poverty reduction.
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Source: Malawi Economic Justice Network (MEJN)
This paper looks at the water supply and sanitation sector financing and expenditure to determine the levels of investment into the sector. This is done by analysing the figures from the national budgets and other sources of funding and looking at actual funding trends during the past five years.
Overall, the water and sanitation sector is not receiving as much priority as it should have been accorded. However, within the sector, this report’s findings show that water is receiving some priority than sanitation in Malawi. In terms of finance, the government needs to show good commitment in supporting the sector. Comparatively, the financing from government alone is still extremely low compared to other social sectors. Without an improvement in this area neither the problem of equity in safe water availability will be fully addressed, nor will the sanitation problem be resolved.
There are also a number of areas that need improvement regarding the sector as a whole in order to improve its effectiveness and coverage. First, it appears that the sector is mostly donor and NGO dependent. The role of government seems to be passive in terms of both policy support and grassroots implementation. The district offices need to be fully empowered so that problem of equity within the districts is addressed. This can only happen with sufficient resources available to them.
Secondly, support from the donors need to be well coordinated, so that the right targets for achieving good results are realised. The health sector has shown considerable progress in SWAp, which is basically a shift from individual project approaches to a new arrangement where donors contribute to the strengthening of the entire sector based on agreed priorities. The current situation in the sector shows a lot of different projects spread geographically, with some areas getting a better share than others. With well coordinated support, all players can effectively take an active role. This can start with good planning, implementation, and then, monitoring and evaluation, right from the village level to ministry headquarters level.
Finally, the overall civil society involved in water sector is also not well coordinated, and has little interface with the government and donors at national levels. NGOs are not in the mainstream of issues despite their good share of the budget in the sector. These organisations have a potential to play a major role in monitoring the sector in terms of general development, equity on distribution of water points, sustainability of the interventions, and above all, push the government on funding of the sector. There is an absence of a good active network of organisations in the sector and neither is there a Parliamentary Committee on water to represent such issues in the legislature.
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