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The Kingdom of Cambodia is bordered by Thailand to the west, Laos to the north and Vietnam to the east. The population at the time of the 1998 National Census was 11.4 million people, of whom 84.3% lived in rural areas. Population growth was estimated at 2.47% per year.
Following Independence in 1953 Cambodia was governed as a one-party state. King Sihanouk abdicated in favour of his father in order to become Prime Minister. He ruled until 1970 attempting to keep Cambodia neutral despite the war in neighbouring Vietnam. A coup in 1970 sparked civil war between the new government which was aligned with the Americans and a country-side based alliance of royalists, Cambodian communists and Vietnamese communists. By the time the government was defeated in 1975 the Cambodian communists dominated the resistance. These "Khmer Rouge" ruled Cambodia from 17th April 1975 until 7th January 1979. They abolished money, isolated the country from the outside world, resettled the urban population in the countryside, introduced a nation-wide regime of forced labour, where religion, love, friendship, tradition and education were all brutally repressed. During this time over a million people died of starvation and disease and a further 200 000 were executed. Older Cambodians remember these 3 years 8 months and 20 days as a time of unbearable terror. They often express anxiety that younger generations and foreigners might not believe how awful it was.
In 1979 a Vietnam-supported invasion by Khmer Rouge defectors led to the formation of a new government. A centrally planned economy and Soviet Bloc style political control were features of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) state which was supported by Vietnamese troops and advisors until they withdrew in 1989 as the Soviet Union began to collapse. During the 1980s the Khmer Rouge and their royalist and republican allies were accommodated in refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border where they received western military support and continued to be recognised as the legitimate government of Cambodia by the United Nations.
A peace agreement signed in 1991 enabled the United Nations to sponsor democratic elections in 1993 leading to the election of a coalition government featuring the former PRK leadership and a royalist party (the Cambodian People's Party and FUNCINPEC respectively). Although the government was a coalition, the entire state apparatus continued to be dominated by civil servants who had worked for the government through the 1980s. A United Nations drafted constitution was adopted by the National Assembly in September 1993 and confirmed the Kingdom of Cambodia as a multiparty, liberal democracy. Weak government revenue collection and a refusal by donors to fund government salaries have led to a poorly paid and poorly motivated public service during the past decade.
About 20 International NGOs worked in Cambodia throughout the period of international isolation in the 1980s and provided direct support to the government. Today, there at least 185 international NGOs and 384 local NGOs active in Cambodia (CCC et al, June 2001). A recent NGO study of the NGO sector in Cambodia has concluded that "The official policy towards NGOs is one of partnership and non-interference. The relationship between government and NGOs is mostly complementary and mutually beneficial; there are periods of tension though" (Khus 2000: 5).
Approximately 80 percent of the Cambodian population live on less than a dollar a day and spend more than half of their income on food. More than half of the population live on less than half a dollar a day and spend 70 per cent or more of this on food (SIDA 2001).
Economic growth (which has been steady during the 1990s but disrupted by the Asian financial crisis and domestic political troubles in 1997-8) has not been matched by a proportional reduction in poverty. Economic growth is principally benefiting the better off portion of the population. Poverty expressed as a percentage of population has reduced slightly, with 36% of the population judged to be below the national poverty line in 1997. However, because of population growth the number of poor people has remained unchanged. Poverty in rural areas has been measured at 40.1% while in Phnom Penh at 11.1% (SEDP II).
In the countryside most people have traditionally depended for livelihoods on a mixture of foraging in the forests, farming on the rice plain and fishing in lakes and rivers and also in the rice paddies. Private business people have gained control of many of these resources, especially fisheries and forests, and denied rural people access to them. This has made the poorer sector of rural society more vulnerable to shocks, including especially health problems and the frequent floods and droughts which afflict the rural economy. The apparent resilience of the rural economy to the 2000 floods may indicate the extent to which every year brings floods or drought to many farmers. The increased vulnerability to shocks is resulting in rapidly increased rural landlessness – recent research suggests that fully 3% of the rural population are landless as a result of an episode of illness (with rural landlessness at 12.7%)[1]
Expanding population in rural areas is gradually creating push-migration into urban areas and also, illegally into Thailand. The expanding garment sector is creating work for some, but this is principally for young women with good education levels. For others, especially those migrating to Thailand, migration carries heavy financial and health risks and can undermine rather than strengthen families' livelihoods. In Phnom Penh some poor communities have been well served by government and non-government agencies, but many other poor people do not have access to basic services and are unable to resist forced relocation to unsuitable sites far from the city[2].
The most widely recognised strategic development planning instrument used by the Royal Government of Cambodia since the 1993 election is the five year Socio-Economic Development Plan (SEDP) which is mandated in the constitution and must be approved by the National Assembly. SEDP I was from 1996-2000 and was drafted in English by an ADB consultant working in support of the Ministry of Planning.
This plan included:
§ A forecast of government revenues
§ A forecast of donor money for Cambodia
§ A breakdown of priorities for spending by sector
§ Suggestions for priority programmes
A "Medium-Term Economic and Financial Policy Framework Paper, 1999-2002" dated 6 October 1999 was prepared "by the Cambodian Authorities in Collaboration with the staffs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank". This sets socio-economic development in a framework of macroeconomic and structural reform policies. It was submitted to the IMF with a request for a three-year structural adjustment loan of approximately $80 million and an undertaking to consult with IMF about the appropriateness of the Royal Government's policies at any time that the Managing Director of the IMF requests such consultation[3].
Neither the Financial Policy Framework Paper, nor the policies and targets outlined in the Letter of Intent, nor the size and terms of the loan which was requested received the benefit of a participatory planning process[4].
Both the PIP and the MTEF are three-year plans that are updated every year. The PIP is a list of programmes that is prepared by the Ministry of Planning. Line Ministries submit project proposals to the Ministry of Planning which consolidates the overall PIP. This includes the project costs, and running costs directly related to the projects but not other running costs. The PIP was initiated in 1996 with support from the ADB. The MTEF is prepared by the Ministry of Economics and Finance and includes planned public expenditure, both capital investment costs and running costs. The MTEF was initiated in 1993-4 under the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, with support from IMF and the World Bank.
The annual budget is prepared during the second half of the year and is passed by the National Assembly at the end of the year. Prior to the debate on the budget, the Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI) holds a seminar with all members of the Senate and the National Assembly in order to review performance against the previous year's budget and to prepare for the parliamentary debates.
The major lesson learned from the period of SEDP I was that links between planning and implementation have been very weak. In other words, what was planned was quite different to what actually occurred. The second draft of the SEDP II points to some of the problems that cause this:
However, it is evident that actual public resource allocation was not in line with the target allocation. This reflected the fact that the plan did not control the annual budget, and that public investment projects were in large part undertaken on the basis of what funding was available from donors[Footnote: Between 1996 and 1998, 88 percent of aid came in project form, much of it bypassing the planning and budgetary process (CDC 2000)]. The PIP and the annual budget were prepared on parallel tracks, with Ministry of Economics and Finance and Ministry of Planning holding separate discussions with line ministries on the recurrent and capital budgets respectively. In addition, the Council for the Development of Cambodia held separate discussions with line ministries on public investment priorities to be presented to the Consultative Group of donors' meetings. The failure to coordinate these discussions meant aid flows, the PIP, and the budget were not integrated (Ministry of Planning, 2000:30).
In May 2000, just prior to the donor Consultative Group (CG) meetings held in Paris, the government launched the processes for both the Socio-Economic Development Plan and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper.
During this consultancy, World Bank and Asian Development Bank staff who were asked about the meetings and discussions that took place in order to arrive at this decision did not give specific answers. They preferred to stress that the Prime Minister made the decision.
However, during the 2000 CG meeting, the Royal Government expressed a clear preference for just one strategic plan. It appears clear, therefore, that the inability of the World Bank and ADB to achieve agreement on how to add value to the already existing plans and to harmonise their (broadly similar) policy agendas, led the Royal Government to reluctantly adopt the idea of having two strategic plans.
Before conducting a full PRSP process, the IMF and the World Bank require governments with immediate lending needs to produce a short paper called an 'Interim PRSP' (I-PRSP). Thus, the timetable for strategic planning was due to be:
1. May – October 2000 Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
2. October 2000 – April 2001 Socio-Economic Development Plan II
3. April – October 2001 – Full Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
In other words, three consecutive processes producing three different documents. I-PRSP was completed on schedule. A draft SEDP II was completed in English in March, but a Khmer translation did not become available until late July.
The process for the full PRSP was due to be launched during a National PRSP Workshop on 25-26 April 2001. However, at this workshop a number of speakers raised fundamental questions about the relationships between the different strategic plans and multi-year budget instruments. Some people were unsure what was the supposed difference between the PRSP and the SEDP II. Others were unsure how the detailed costings and priorities in the PRSP were to relate to the projects in the PIP.
Prior to the April workshop, and in the Aide Memoire that followed it, World Bank staff began to 'reiterate' their 'flexibility on content and timing' of the PRSP. This was on condition that 'the strategy is focused on reducing poverty and promoting growth, sets out priorities consistent with macroeconomic and fiscal constraints as well as implementation capacity, and is put together in an open and participatory process". They went on to suggest the possibility that SEDP II could be improved in order to make just one strategic planning document, but that this might take longer than had originally been planned. This flexibility has generally been seen as a welcome development from their earlier view that "In an ideal world, it might be advisable to prepare only one product. In practice, however, the two products have different audiences and different timings"[5].
There was no immediate response from the Royal Government as to how they wished to revise the time frame and process for national poverty reduction planning. However, by late July 2001, it was agreed that the SEDP II should be completed by October 2001 and that the full PRSP should be completed sometime in 2002.
The Royal Government is committed to poverty reduction, which is the central objective of The Royal Government's Platform for its Second Term 1998-2003. The government has also committed itself to strategic planning through its engagement in both the PRSP and SEDP II processes, both of which have been launched by the Prime Minister.
Royal Government officials have identified two key constraints to their own performance[6]:
1. Poor inter-ministerial communication and coordination (this similarly applies to relations within ministries and between national and provincial levels of government)
2. Difficulty in controlling and coordinating donors
The latter constraint is made worse by the fact that government salaries are inadequate, and that donors pay supplements to officials working on donors' programmes. Effectively, therefore, ministries are often segregated into different compartments on the payrolls of different donors.
For the purpose of strategic planning, performance is constrained by the weak connection between planning, budgeting and expenditure. This is also related to the constraints mentioned above.
Likewise, the fragmented process above is reflected in a fragmentation of responsibility for these three processes. The I-PRSP was facilitated and largely authored by a Deputy Secretary General in the Ministry of Economy and Finance; the SEDP II is the responsibility of an Under Secretary of State in the Ministry of Planning; the full PRSP is the responsibility of a different Under Secretary of State in the Ministry of Planning.
NGOs in Cambodia have a long history of work experience in direct alleviation of poverty (international NGOs since 1979 and Cambodian NGOs since 1991). More recently NGOs in Cambodia have demonstrated a capacity to assist government policy-making and legislation through carrying out research and advocacy. This has helped the government to ensure that investments in fields such as land and forestry really are contributing to poverty reduction.
NGOs have good links with international networks and are therefore able to gather information and resources quickly in response to new challenges. They also have a history of working cross-culturally and often have the capacity to analyse and respond to documents in both Khmer and English languages.
In Cambodia, key constraints facing NGOs include:
1. A lack of capacity in macro-economic analysis and policy-making and a lack of understanding of public expenditure management[7].
2. A lack of legitimacy in terms of representing and being accountable to constituencies of poor people (i.e. most NGOs in Cambodia are specialised development agencies, not associations of poor people).
3. Networks of NGOs are not well-established in every province and links from provincial to national level and links between different NGOs at national level are not always strong. Twelve months after its launch, many NGOs in Cambodia are still not aware that a PRSP process is occurring.
Annual donor meetings have given NGOs experience in developing consensus positions in relation to various sectors and policies.
The World Bank has high capacity staff who can draw on experience of many countries in order to share relevant examples and advice. World Bank policies are driven by its Board of Directors. Policies have to survive strong critical scrutiny, and therefore are likely to have a critical mass of support amongst other donors (who are also Board members).
Through the Country Assistance Strategy process the World Bank demonstrated its ability to carry out high quality consultations in Cambodia, and to respond to views of other stakeholders. Likewise, World Bank staff who have long relationships with Cambodia have been able to make valuable contributions to their sectors.
In Cambodia, World Bank weaknesses are:
1. A country office which does not have the resources to carry out basic functions, including adequate briefing of visiting consultants and staff.
2. A reliance on visiting missions of Bank staff or consultants who are not able to spend sufficient time to understand Cambodian conditions or to build relationships.
The combination of the above factors leads in some cases to a very low capacity to carry out good intentions.
The World Bank has a $260,000 grant project to assist the Royal Government of Cambodia to prepare its Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. The project runs from 14 December 2000 to 13 December 2002 and Mr Su Yong Song is the Bank Lead for this project.
The PRSP is an externally imposed requirement, and therefore it is somewhat paradoxical to refer to it as being country driven.
What we are looking for here is evidence that the government and people of Cambodia have taken control of this process, are using it to serve their own needs and are adapting it to the specific situation of the country.
National control is most obviously lacking with respect to the fact that from May 2000 until May 2001 the Royal Government was working towards producing two strategic plans (SEDP II and PRSP), when in fact it only wanted to have one. This is clearly the reason that the Senior Minister of Economy and Finance departed from the text of his prepared speech at the PRSP Workshop on 26th April to criticise donors for giving him headaches by not co-operating.
From a content point of view, the Interim PRSP appears more heavily influenced by World Bank/IMF dialogue than by Cambodian dialogue. The dimensions of poverty which are described in the I-PRSP are exactly the same dimensions of poverty that are described in the World Bank source-books on Poverty Reduction Strategies. Furthermore, the macro-economic approach of the I-PRSP relies on the Policy Framework Paper which appears to have been drafted by the IMF.
The quality of consultation for an Interim PRSP is critical, because at this stage key parts of the plan may be determined. In other words, the macro-economic framework favoured by the IMF and World Bank may be written into the plan before there is any discussion, making it an input instead of an output of the planning process. For this reason, two international NGOs have made the following recommendation to the IMF
We believe that any short-term interim paper should focus primarily on the process of the full-fledged Poverty Reduction Strategy and refrain from determining its content. Instead, the content should be shaped through the process of dialogue and consensus between a government with its citizens (CIDSE and CARITAS: 2000).
Language is another important issue in Cambodia. Both the I-PRSP and the SEDP II have been drafted in English language. The I-PRSP was drafted in English and a Khmer copy was not released to the public before the document was passed by the Council of Ministers in October 2000. SEDP II was also drafted in English and a Khmer translation was not released until July 2001. Unsurprisingly, given that the document is 323 pages long and in English, none of the thirty Cambodians in the rural sector discussion group at the PRSP workshop on 25th April 2001 had read the SEDP II draft. As a result, the plans are being analysed and discussed by foreigners[8] while most Cambodians are not able to access them at all.
The following comments to a UNDP Regional Workshop on Poverty Reduction Strategies by the Representative of the NGO Forum on Cambodia reflect on the language issue from an NGO perspective:
All drafts of the I-PRSP up to the eighth and final draft have been in English. A Khmer translation of the final draft prepared for the Council of Ministers has not yet been released to NGOs. This raises serious questions about the country ownership of the I-PRSP. While not doubting the hard work that some government officials may have contributed to the I-PRSP, the choice of language can exclude important government decision-makers, limit civil society participation, impose foreign ways of thinking, and give foreign donors an inordinate amount of power to influence the final outcome. Our observation, as an organisation with years of experience in working in two languages, is that even commonplace European ideas and concepts do not translate easily into Khmer. We found that Cambodians only began to be fully included in the discussions and debates of the NGO Forum when Khmer was made the main language of discourse. A truly country-owned PRSP process would entail drafting the document solely in Khmer, and with the donors (not the Cambodians) puzzling over the meaning of the translation and strange concepts used. While I understand the constraints of moving quickly to a solely Khmer-language debate and drafting process, this being something which we NGOs have often not achieved, this needs to be the medium and long-term objective of capacity building for country ownership.
The current assessment therefore supports earlier reviews (UNDP 2000, UNDP 2001, SIDA 2001) that suggest that while individual officials in the government have shown great commitment and ownership, the process until now has been far too donor-driven. Most people in Cambodian government and society have not had adequate opportunity to read or understand the plans so far, much less 'drive' or exercise influence over them.
The extent to which either document articulates strategies that are likely to have an impact on economic growth or reduce poverty appears to be the major content issue being raised by donors[9]. The purpose of the strategy is to maximise the anti-poverty impact of public investments. At present neither the I-PRSP nor the SEDP II appear to relate policy choices to the objective of poverty reduction. Both SIDA and the UNDP have suggested that much more work should be done in order to identify which policies will have the largest impact on poverty, and therefore should be the priorities for investment.
NGOs and other civil society representatives in Cambodia have argued that weaknesses in the PRSP process in Cambodia have led to important weaknesses in content (see Appendices III and IV for more detailed NGO commentaries on the I-PRSP and SEDP II drafts). The main content weaknesses pointed to by NGOs have been as follows:
NGOs have suggested that social and environmental concerns should be given priority attention, and also that directing resources towards sectors that do not give immediate or rapid economic growth (especially small scale agriculture) may in fact be most effective for poverty reduction.
NGO consultations on poverty reduction have identified two broad areas as the priorities for achieving results in poverty reduction:
Likewise NGOs have suggested the following priority sectors for poverty reduction purposes: 1 Rural Development and Decentralisation; 2 Agriculture and Food Security; 3 Land Forestry Fisheries and Environment; 4 Health and Education; 5 Women´s and Children´s Rights; 6 Industrial Workers and Urban Poor; 7 Good Goverance and Human Rights; 8 Disaster Management.
If the full PRSP is also to be results oriented it must include clear targets and means to measure those targets. In SEDP II it is noted that a major weakness of SEDP I was the lack of a monitoring framework. SEDP II does include such a framework[10]. The indicators for poverty reduction, sustained economic growth with equity and social development appear to be easy to monitor using existing government surveys and statistics. There is acknowledgement within SEDP II of some of the limitations of the existing poverty index, and this is an issue which donors (World Bank, UNDP, SIDA) are preparing to provide support for both through providing technical assistants to the PRSP process and to the new Poverty Monitoring and Analysis unit of the Council for Social Development.
Regarding environment, however, the monitoring intentions are extremely weak. The Outcomes Matrix in SEDP II simply refers to a list of policy actions for monitoring of environmental management. This list only includes passing a new land law, forestry law and Fisheries Master Plan and also drafting the implementing regulations for the new land law. These do not to any degree constitute monitoring of the outcomes or impact of the plan. Without indicators that actually measure the state of the environment this part of the SEDP II/PRSP cannot be considered to be results-oriented, or even particularly serious.
Finally, with respect to result orientation, there appears to be a lack of realism with regard to the effectiveness that can be expected from programmes. Both NGO and bilateral programmes over the past ten years have repeatedly shown, for example, that extending micro-finance (savings and credit) to the poorest families is extremely difficult, and that it is the better off families who tend to be able to benefit from these services.
A plan can be comprehensive in a number of ways.
One role of a strategic plan is to guide budgeting decisions, which in turn should guide expenditure. One lesson from SEDP I was that plan-budget-expenditure links are rather weak. The processes by which strategic planning, multi-year budgeting and annual budgets and expenditures are linked, including the processes for guiding and monitoring official development assistance (ODA), will need to be more fully articulated in the full PRSP.
The current I-PRSP and SEDP II have been comprehensive in terms of attempting to consolidate plans from different line ministries. This task is not yet complete because some of the sectoral plans of line ministries have not yet been completed. Indeed, in this respect it may be that the SEDP II is being somewhat too comprehensive. It may be that a strategic plan such as SEDP II/PRSP should provide guidance for sectoral allocations and planning, but that it does not need to duplicate efforts by incorporating detailed sectoral plans into a national plan.
Important ways in which the plans are not yet comprehensive include:
§ No acknowledgement of the roles and capacities of provincial and commune administrations and issues of inter-jurisdictional allocation. Specifically, poverty weighting of formulae for transfers to deconcentrated and decentralised government units will be a key tool for insuring that investments are targeted towards poverty reduction.
§ Failure to address the issue of disaster preparedness and management, especially in respect to the constant cycle of drought and flood in rural Cambodia.
§ Failure to propose any special programmes for identified vulnerable groups.
In recent months Ministries have been involved in preparing ten-year plans under the coordination of the Ministry of Planning in preparation for a conference of Least Developed Countries. There appears to be no consideration of this ten-year time frame in the current five-year and three-year plans.
UNDP analyses of the SEDP II and PRSP call for a longer term planning perspective, and also point to the need to achieve international development targets by 2015. Interestingly, in the last World Bank Country Assistance Strategy consultations with the Council of Ministers, ministers expressed reservations about Cambodia's ability to achieve those targets.
If there is to be a longer-term perspective adopted during this round of strategic planning it will need to be incorporated as soon as possible, before plans are made for completing the full PRSP and/or SEDP II.
Donors, government and NGOs have all committed themselves to a partnership approach and have talked of the importance of incorporating all stakeholders at all stages. However, a number of severe reservations have been raised regarding the quality of partnership in the preparation of I-PRSP and SEDP II.
World Bank and ADB appear to have worked more in competition than in collaboration leading to an unwieldy 3-phase process (I-PRSP, SEDP II, Full PRSP), in which each party only appears willing to take responsibility for certain phases. As one provincial official put it "Different donors use different arms of government, until the left arm does not know what the right arm is doing". The poor behaviour of the two Banks has badly damaged the confidence of both Government and NGOs in the value of national strategic planning processes.
Ironically, the World Bank has stated that NGO submissions have influenced it towards adopting a more flexible approach to the timing of the full PRSP process. If a more coordinated approach had been adopted from the beginning, such flexibility would not be required at this late stage.
Despite statements of good intention from the Banks and senior Government policy-makers, therefore, the PRSP and SEDP II processes thus far cannot be said to have benefited from either 'partnership' or 'participation'.
For NGOs, opportunities to participate have been restricted to commenting on drafts and to attending national workshops. Building on experience gained in developing position papers for Consultative Group meetings, and with assistance from the UNDP, NGOs have organised consultations in selected provinces, and have thereby coordinated responses to drafts of the SEDP and PRSP[11]. The NGO submissions have not yet been acknowledged by the government, and it is not clear that they have had any substantive influence on the content of the drafts produced so far. They are, however, on the table as resources for input into the remaining stages of I-PRSP and SEDP II formulation.
Provincial authorities have been in an even weaker position than NGOs. They have not received copies of drafts (and mostly would not have been able to read them any way because they were long and in English language), therefore the national workshops held in March (for the SEDP II) and April (for the PRSP) have been their only opportunity to participate. Opportunity to comment in these National Workshops (especially the March workshop, but also the one in April) was extremely limited. Furthermore, most participants – government and non-government - were excluded by the fact that main speakers chose to speak English and interpreting was inadequate[12].
An approach where opportunities to 'participate' only occur from time to time, only at the instigation of the Banks/government and only at relatively late stages in the process have several disadvantages. All of these disadvantages have been apparent in Cambodia over the past twelve months:
§ Lack of confidence in the process. Two categories can be defined. Firstly, people who have been excluded believe that the process has been conducted incompetently, as was evidenced by comments of provincial officials during the March workshop. Secondly, people believe that the exclusion is a way of ensuring that the global priorities and policies of IMF and World Bank are inserted without discussion or debate, as was evidenced by NGO comments in the April workshop.
§ Failure to make use of resources that are available for the process. During this consultancy it has been apparent that government and World Bank personnel are extremely overworked and therefore unable to complete their work adequately. Meanwhile, there are NGOs who are committed to contributing to the process, including by providing human resources, but people at the Ministry of Planning and the World Bank are often too busy to even speak to them.
§ Increased probability of conflict. Because people only occasionally meet in workshops, they do not develop the good relationships that are needed to understand each other's situations. As a result, there is a higher risk that groups who should be cooperating begin to criticise each other.
Finally, what has been the role of poor people as 'partners' or 'participants' in the drafting of an anti-poverty strategy thus far? A so-called Participatory Poverty Assessment has been carried out. However, apart from a three-page summary, none of the results have been available to stakeholders in the I-PRSP and SEDP II process. Furthermore, none of the 'participants' in the PPA have been present at the national consultative workshops on SEDP II and PRSP.
In other words, the last 12 months of anti-poverty planning have not benefited from the inputs of the poor.
This report, like others before it, has noted the weaknesses in the process for anti-poverty planning over the past twelve months. Included in those weaknesses is the fact that there has been little or no opportunity for NGOs to have impact on those strategies.
However, if the opportunities for participation or partnership had been greater, what would the contribution of NGOs have been? Do NGOs have to wait to be invited to participate, or are there ways that they can take more initiative?
This report has suggested a number of actions, all of which will require reorientation of resources by NGOs and their donors. This report suggests a need for more resources for coordination at the centre – probably the Cooperation Committee for Cambodia and the NGO Forum on Cambodia. A companion study of World Bank-NGO relations suggests that it will not be enough to allocate resources centrally, and that individual NGOs will also need to allocate some time and resources to individual initiatives in order to be able to contribute to an NGO sector that is better able to contribute substantially to poverty reduction strategies in Cambodia.
The specific resource implications of recommendations in this report are:
1. Funding for additional staff to build knowledge and understanding of macro-economic issues, public finance issues and the priorities and agendas of International Finance Institutions. This could be a Cambodian economist and an expatriate research assistant. If based at NGO Forum on Cambodia, these could take advantage of links with the NGO Forum Working Group on Development Banks and the CCC Analysing Development Issues unit.
2. Funding of a full-time person to work in the Poverty Monitoring and Assessment unit of the Council for Social Development. This person could be a human resource donation, spending 80% time working to the direction of the PMA leadership and 20% disseminating information about the PMA work to NGOs.
3. Funding for public debates with mass media coverage. Building on the success of initiatives such as the Center for Social Development town hall meetings, NGOs need to create opportunities for poor people to engage policy-makers in discussions of the policy options that might make a difference to their poverty.
[1] See Oxfam GB report "Where has all the Land Gone? Volume 4: Making the Poor More Visible" p24 and p30 English version
[2] see NGO submission to 2001 Consultative Group meeting in Tokyo.
[3] See IMF web-site: http://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/1999/093099.htm
[4] The intention from the World Bank is that the macro-economic policy framework should be an output of the PRSP (Sourcebook for Poverty Reduction Strategies and perscomm.Jeni Klugman), and that PRSPs should replace PFPs.
[5] Aide-Memoire of the Joint World Bank/IMF mission for I-PRSP (July 24-August 11 2000)
[6] See for instance Consultations with the Council of Ministers for the World Bank Country Assistance Strategy (WB 2000:104).
[7] A notable exception to this is the Cambodia Development Resource Institute which employs senior economists and provides economic information and analysis services to government and to other NGOs.
[8] To our knowledge, not including this document, 8 English-language assessments of I-PRSP and SEDP II have been produced, including one by SIDA which itself contained 5 comprehensive papers. Of these, only two are currently available in Khmer language.
[9] See UNDP 2000, UNDP 2001, SIDA 2001 and also the World Bank/IMF Joint Staff Assessment of the I-PRSP.
[10] SEDP II Chapter 15, specifically Table 15.1
[11] See NGO Forum on Cambodia(3 November 2000) Volumes 1 and 2, and Appendices of this report.
[12] During interviews for this consultancy, provincial NGOs and provincial government officials expressed great surprise and disappointment that they had been called to 'participate' in these plans at national level, only to discover that the plans had already been drafted, that they could barely understand what was being said in the workshops and that there was little or no time for them to express their opinions even at this late stage.