| :: Home Top-level African meeting to assess poverty reduction strategies ECA Press Release No. 04/2006 Addis Ababa, 22 March 2006 - A High-level conference, expected to bring together African finance ministers, sector ministers such as education and health ministers, and other senior officials, will, discuss the effectiveness of poverty reduction strategies on the continent and their contribution to meeting the Millennium Development Goals. The conference, which will take place in Cairo, Egypt from 26 to 28 March, is jointly organized by ECA and the African Union, with the co-sponsorship of the UN Development Programme. Recent assessments of Africa’s progress towards the MDGs indicate very slow and hesitant progress. These assessments come at a time when the “first generation” of Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS) reach their conclusion with many, if not all of Africa’s highly-indebted poor countries (HIPCs) having reached the HIPC completion point. As these countries begin to prepare their next national strategies to reduce poverty, it is timely to take stock of the PRSP initiative, review lessons learned and explore what principles should brace up “second generation” strategies. Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) were introduced in 1999 within the context of the enhanced highly-indebted poor countries initiative with the express objective of increasing the poverty focus of national strategies through improved planning, implementation and monitoring of public actions. The initiative was anchored on key principles such as country ownership, broad-based stakeholder participation, results orientation and partnerships. While there were some positive outcomes such as an improved focus on poverty and governance, there is a general consensus that the initiative fell significantly short of its promise. It is agreed that the framework paid insufficient attention to important areas such as growth, employment and gender and raised important new issues such as the tension between broad-based stakeholder participation in policy formulation and the fledgling institutions of representative democracy in Africa. The Cairo meeting presents an opportunity for formulating and implementing national plans for growth and poverty reduction and identifying what the key underlying principles of such strategies should be. It will do so by serving as a forum for sharing of country experiences and through the exploration of ways for implementing the second generation of PRS. Based on experience distilled from the first wave of poverty reduction strategies, the next wave, the second generation strategies will need to address four core issues: the content of the strategies (especially the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction); ownership, leadership and accountability for PRS; the capacity to implement those strategies; and external assistance. The conference is expected to issue an Outcome document outlining a framework for the “second generation” of strategies aimed at reducing poverty and reaching the Millennium Development Goals. Issued
by the ECA Communication Team |
