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NGOs share the Royal Government's objective of poverty reduction, and wish to contribute their experiences and expertise in order to ensure that national poverty reduction strategies are realistic and effective. NGOs have limited resources, and usually have full work-plans. The following are recommended both to improve the process and to facilitate NGO contributions:
1. Have only one strategic anti-poverty development plan. This should have a consistent anti-poverty focus and should be a five-year plan. Meet with the World Bank and the ADB to request better donor coordination in support of this one strategic plan.
2. Develop a document that is as short as possible. It should provide guidance for sectoral planning, and should refer to existing sectoral plans, but does not need to duplicate them.
3. Ensure that donor conditions are articulated separately and prior to the planning process in order that the national plan can be a statement of the Royal Government’s strategy and not a combination of donor and government strategies.
4. In consultation with partners, make a time-table for the formulation of the plan, with very generous timings in order that provincial authorities, NGOs and other civil society organisations can have an opportunity to understand and contribute to the process and can plan their participation.
5. Conduct all substantive discussions about the planning process in Khmer language and draft documents in Khmer first (which will mean allowing more time, and using Bank technical assistants to provide advice rather than to write documents).
6. Use television and radio in order to raise awareness of the Royal Government's wish to gather ideas and support for a national poverty reduction strategy.
7. Create opportunities for NGO involvement in every stage of the process, including full-time staff within Ministry of Planning or the Council for Social Development. This will ensure that the NGO community fully understands the larger strategy and will be in a position to assist in implementation.
8. Ensure that decentralisation and deconcentration are integral to the poverty reduction strategy. This would imply: substantial consultation with provincial governors; clear guidance on fiscal transfers to provincial and sub-provincial government structures.
9. Ensure that there are clear indicators for monitoring the environmental impact of the plan in order that short term economic growth is not achieved by destroying the resources that future generations will depend on for their livelihoods.
10. Ensure that the budgeting implications of the plan are very clear. If provincial authorities and civil society organisations can see that the plan has an impact on government and donor spending and revenue collection they will give it more support and respect.
1. NGOs should continue to advocate for a higher quality participatory planning process, with participation at every stage and not just opportunities to comment on drafts. However, NGOs should also acknowledge the difficult position of the government, which has spent more than a year preparing strategic plans and may not want to start again. The focus should possibly be on the design of the process for the next plan, and on monitoring the implementation of this plan (see below).
2. Ensure that there is an NGO focal point (NGO Forum?) that is sufficiently well-resourced to be able to communicate with all NGOs providing summary information on the national planning process.
3. Strengthen provincial networks and their links with national level, so that all provincial NGOs have access to regular information outputs from the NGO focal point.
4. Offer technical assistance and human resources to the government in support of its work on poverty reduction strategies; including assistance in developing ways to ensure the participation of poor people and their representatives in planning and monitoring.
5. Set aside resources for monitoring the plan, including the possibility of seconding staff full-time to the Poverty Monitoring and Analysis unit of the Council for Social Development.
6. Strengthen formal and informal relationships between NGO network co-ordinators and key staff in ministries. This will make is easier for government to seek assistance from NGOs and also for NGOs to access information from government.
7. International and local NGOs should support both formulation and monitoring of poverty reduction strategies by facilitating public debates and dialogue, including opportunities for poor people and their representatives to engage in discussion with government policy-makers.
8. Build on existing work by the NGO Forum on Cambodia Working Group on Development Banks and the Cambodia Development Resource Institute in order to better understand and monitor the links between planning, budgeting and expenditure.
9. In critical sectors, provide support to line ministries in order to help them articulate their anti-poverty strategies to core ministries, especially in the case of under-resourced ministries, such as the Ministry for Social Affairs, with a mandate to assist the poorest.
10. Given that the foundations of the plan have already been developed, NGOs should focus on identifying the sort of policy research and analysis that will be needed to influence the next round of strategic planning. This will mean using future discussions about the current plans to identify key assumptions and cause and effect links that should be monitored.
11. Either as part of the Poverty Monitoring and Analysis unit or as a complementary initiative, design rapid assessment tools that will enable local organisations (for example commune councils or self-help groups) to conduct their own local poverty monitoring to enable them to evaluate the impact of the strategy on their local community.
12. Use the dialogue, information sharing and research above to develop consensus around key positions before the next round of strategic planning begins.
1. Redouble efforts to ensure that the national strategic planning processes are nationally owned. This might include separating responsibilities for monitoring and responsibilities for capacity building (such that Bank staff or consultants are responsible either for capacity building tasks, or monitoring tasks, but not both simultaneously).
2. Acknowledge negative impacts on the quality of strategic planning in Cambodia arising from unacceptably poor cooperation between World Band and ADB in relation to strategic planning in Cambodia. Do not look to assign blame, but build towards a more productive future (see next two recommendations).
3. Prioritise working in harmony. Certainly there should only be joint missions in support of strategic planning and not separate ones. Likewise, consultants should be jointly hired and supported. Serious consideration should also be given to sharing one country office.
4. Jointly offer your services to the Royal Government (at executive level and not just at line ministry level) to review and rationalise the instruments for strategic planning and multi-year budgeting. Use that opportunity to re-confirm for yourselves the roles and relationships of Ministry of Planning, Ministry of Economics and Finance and Council for Development of Cambodia.
5. Continue to build on the intention in the World Bank CAS to ensure that technical assistance is strongly oriented towards capacity building. The mid-term review of the CAS should particularly focus on progress in this direction. NGOs have long capacity building experience in Cambodia, and their evaluation expertise could be recruited to assist in this process.
6. (Related to the previous point) Ensure that the IFI technical assistants provided to assist with strategic planning understand that the length and style of the planning documents should be tailored to the capacity (time available and educational level) of the government officials who will need to write and to read those documents.
7. And specifically, instruct IFI technical assistants working to support strategic national planning not to draft the documents themselves.