Parliament and Poverty Reduction Strategies - PRS

Parliaments make laws, vote on the budget, represent the will of the people, and scrutinize the executive. Yet consultations on the first generation of Poverty Reduction Strategies largely excluded the institution.

An OED report on Bank support for the PRS initiative through 2003 noted, "The involvement of parliaments has been a particularly weak aspect of the process in the case study countries. In most PRS countries, legislators were not consulted at all. In a few countries, parliament’s role was limited to individual Members of Parliament, typically from government parties."

"But this trend is changing," says a 2005 report on PRS in Africa by the German GTZ agency and the Canadian Parliamentary Centre. "Most elected officials are beginning to take on the responsibility of ensuring that governments remain accountable to the poor."

The Bank responds

Three years ago, the Bank led by PREM, WBI, and the Development Policy Dialogue team began efforts involve parliamentarians in the PRSP process. The key objective is to strengthen parliamentary oversight of PRSP implementation, in particular through oversight of the national budget and through scrutiny by parliamentary committees.

"The Poverty Reduction Strategies are owned by governments, so it’s not up to the Bank to dictate to countries how to design and implement them," said Luca Barbone, Director, PREM Poverty Group. "But we can strongly encourage governments to involve parliaments and give parliamentarians some tools to do so."

Parliaments, Governance and Poverty Reduction, a joint PREM-WBI program, aims to respond to parliaments’ desire for more involvement in the PRS process through knowledge and good practice development, regional and country-level learning activities, and dissemination of lessons to Bank staff and clients.

So far activities have been organized for Francophone Africa, CIS, LAC, and Balkan regions. For example, at a 2004 learning event sponsored by the Parliament of Finland, West African parliaments and partners learned about a promising initiative in Benin, where the parliament has embarked on a program designed to build parliament’s capacity to conduct policy analysis, provide oversight of the budget, monitor poverty reduction efforts, and enhance outreach to the constituency and media organizations.

Said Steve Akorli, MP from Ghana: "Insights from other countries have been most helpful and have shown us how to proceed on the critical areas that confront us. Get us involved a lot more so we can learn and also share experiences."

PRSP regional knowledge sharing and learning events provide opportunities to address ways for improving parliaments’ oversight of the PRS process. Events organized with partners for the CIS, Balkan and LAC regions zoomed in on parliamentary experience at various stages of PRS implementation. Participating MPs have since formed a loose network to enable them to learn from each others’ poverty monitoring challenges.

Field visit program

Separately, the independent Parliamentary Network on the World Bank (PNoWB) runs a parliamentary field visit program in collaboration with the Bank’s Development Policy Dialogue team. Groups of 10-15 parliamentarians from donor and developing countries spend four days in a PRS country meeting with all stakeholder groups to assess first-hand the PRSP process and Bank operations. The program, which is financed by a grant from the Finnish government, has taken MPs to India, Nigeria, Uganda, Burundi, Albania, Kenya, Serbia and Montenegro, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Madagascar.

One participant, Belgian Senator Alain Destexhe, said, "These field visits are really a great idea, and exactly what is needed, exactly the kind of accountability that the public expects."

PNoWB has called on the boards of the Bank and the IMF NOT to consider any Poverty Reduction Strategy that has yet to be put before parliament. The Network plans to launch a working group on parliamentary involvement in Poverty Reduction Strategies.

Some good news but…

Recent trends point to modest but growing parliamentary buy-in to the PRSP process:

• PRSPs have been formally presented to parliament in about half of the countries with full strategies;
  
• About one-third of PRSPs highlight the role which parliament is asked to play in PRS oversight, either through a dedicated PRSP standing committee e.g. Azerbaijan and Ghana, or through membership of executive-led PRSP Steering Committees e.g. Chad and Georgia;
  
• Parliament and citizens-based organizations are beginning to build coalitions in order to bolster their chances to influence policy decisions. Albania’s 2003 education sector budget allocation, for example, was increased as a result of discussions between the "Friends of Education" NGO and Parliament.

But, as GTZ and the Parliamentary Centre point out: "There is growing concern that pro-poor spending is generally not performing as projected because of budgetary implementation weaknesses and that it has taken much time to develop effective monitoring systems for PRSP activity."

Parliaments and the PRSP Review 2005

A key pillar of the 2005 PRSP Review is an analysis of the participatory approaches inspired by the PRS process, especially with respect impact on policy decisions as well as poverty outcomes. The Bank acknowledges that parliaments will need to sustain their engagement in the process - at different stages of the policy cycle – over the longer term.

For more information about PREM’s program, please contact  Katrina Sharkey. For more information about the field visit program, contact  Naye Bathily.

This article was prepared by Katrina Sharkey, Senior Operations Officer, PREM.