Serious implementation of the MDG targets and timelines implies a major shift in development practice. Low-income countries and their development partners now plan around modest incremental expansions of social services and infrastructure. We recommend instead a bold, needs-based, goal-oriented- investment framework over 10 years aimed at achieving the quantitative targets set out in the MDGs. Rather than strategies to “accelerate progress toward the Goals,” we need strategies to “achieve the Goals.”
We recommend a four-step approach.
- First, each country should map the key dimensions and underlying determinants of extreme poverty—by region, locality, and gender—as best as possible with available data.
- Second, consistent with the poverty maps, each country should undertake a needs assessment to identify the specific public investments necessary to achieve the Goals.
- Third, each country should convert the needs assessment into a 10-year framework for action, including public investment, public management, and financing.
- Fourth, each country should elaborate a 3-to-5-year MDG-based poverty reduction strategy within the context of the 10-year framework.
This MDG-based poverty reduction strategy should be a detailed, operational document, attached to a medium-term expenditure framework which translates the strategy into budgetary outlays.
Crucially, the 10-year framework and 3-to-5-year poverty reduction strategy should include a public sector management strategy—with a key focus on transparency, accountability, human rights, and results-based management. They should also include a clear strategy for decentralizing target-setting, decisionmaking, budgeting, and implementation responsibilities to the level of local governments. Further, there should be a clear private sector strategy to promote economic growth and have countries “graduate” from donor assistance in the longer term.
Importantly, we are not advocating new development processes or policy vehicles. We are simply recommending that the current processes be truly MDG-oriented. We support the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers as an important framework for the Goals. But these PRSPs urgently need revision to align them with the Millennium Development Goals. Very few PRSPs are ambitious or comprehensive enough to achieve the Goals, largely because they have been prepared in a context of insufficient donor assistance.
The process of developing an MDG-based poverty reduction strategy needs to be open and consultative, including all key stakeholders, domestic and foreign. Each country should convene an MDG strategy group chaired by the national government—but also including bilateral and multilateral donors, UN specialized agencies, provincial and local authorities, and domestic civil society leaders, including women's organizations, which are traditionally underrepresented. |
