ECONOMY: Views Diverge on World Bank, IMF Anti-Poverty Effort

By Emad Mekay Reprint | | Print |

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Jan 18 2002 (IPS) - Poverty-cutting strategies backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the developing world have yet to make a dent in neediness but may be drawing civil society groups closer to their governments.

“Most poor countries are very elitist by nature,” says Manfred Schnitzer, an official with Austrian Development Cooperation. “What the poverty reduction programme has done is to allow civil society groups to break into this circle of elitism in the developing countries. This is a benefit in itself.”

“We have been consulted all along,” adds Collins Magalasi, of the non-governmental Malawi Economic Justice network. “We even took part in drafting the PRSP.”

PRSP is an abbreviation for Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper or Programme, depending on the context. Established by the World Bank and IMF in 1999, its main aim is to alleviate poverty but its creation stems in part from complaints that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) had been shut out of the development planning process.

Nine countries – Mauritania, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Albania, Honduras, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Uganda, and Tanzania – have completed PRSPs and 40 more have prepared interim plans since the programme was launched two years ago.

Delegates from NGOs in a number of these countries were in Washington this week for a Bank-IMF conference on the initiative.

Hassan Rahaa of TUCTA, a leading trade union organisation in Tanzania, said labour groups have become less marginalised as a result of the PRSP. “We managed to have a say in the PRSP,” Rahaa said. “It wasn’t easy. But now we feel we are in the mainstream. Hopefully our participation will be maintained.”

“Instead of coming up with our own parallel consultation process, we decided to join the official process,” said Magalasi. “We can safely say that 40 percent of the Malawi PRSP came from civil society groups and 60 percent from the government.”

Added the Malawian: “Before the PRSP, civil society groups never had an answer from the government. But after the PRSP we had answers and we took the chance and we’ll continue to force ourselves onto the process.”

Those statements stood in stark contrast to assessments by international NGOs with offices in developing countries but based in the industrialised world.

Action Aid USA, a Washington-based advocacy group, distributed leaflets at this week’s meetings, saying that that NGOs in several developing countries still were being routinely marginalised.

Carol Welch, of Friends of the Earth, said what happened in Malawi and Tanzania was not the dominant color of the picture, that civil society groups continue to be sidelined by officials and the international financial institutions.

“We’ve also heard of trade unions and other civil society groups being completely excluded from the debate,” Welch said. “We are definitely not there yet.”

She said major problems remain with both the process of the PRSP and the content of the much-touted initiative. Governments, the Bank, and IMF still withhold critical information from the public and do not openly debate the performance of past policies and strategies.

Catholic Relief Services said participation was hampered by a lack of funding that could help put PRSPs in local languages and deliver information to locals.

“Without funding and resources, the PRSP will become another unfunded mandate that reaches nobody,” said Kathleen Selvaggio, of the church-based group’s strategic issues division.

Irungu Houghton, programme coordinator with Action Aid USA, noted a parting of ways between Northern and Southern groups, particularly over poverty-reduction approaches.

“I think there’s a dichotomy between the debate taking place domestically over the PRSP, and the debates taking place in DC,” he said, referring to Washington. “On the ground, there has been a tendency among the groups to get involved in specific ways and in certain relationships. But they have been weak in the qualitative and quantitative criteria – like setting fiscal targets, taxation regimes, and inflation.”

Houghton, himself a former activist in his native Kenya, said that the role of Northern organisations should be to support Southern NGOs “to make the kind of interventions they want, rather than focussing on policy briefs in (Washington) DC and the (Bank and IMF) boards of directors.”

Recognising that most PRSPs are still in their infancy when it comes to implementation, Houghton warned that the debate over participation has taken precedence over concrete poverty results.