INTRODUCTION The Reaching the Poor Program (RPP) is an effort to begin finding better ways of ensuring that the benefits of health, nutrition, and population (HNP) programs flow to disadvantaged population groups. It has been undertaken by the World Bank, in cooperation with the Gates Foundation and the Dutch and Swedish Governments. OBJECTIVES In order to help improve how well HNP programs reach poor people, the RPP seeks to: • Determine which HNP programs do and do not reach disadvantaged groups effectively. The resulting information, produced through application of recently-developed quantitative techniques for assessing programs’ distributional performance, is intended to provide guidance to policy makers about which approaches to adopt and to avoid in developing pro-poor initiatives. • Encourage others to undertake similar determinations of HNP program effectiveness in reaching the poor. More widespread application of the recently-techniques just mentioned, derived from the "benefit incidence" approach used to determine who benefits most from government expenditures, would allow policy makers to assess and then improve their performance in reaching the poor on an ongoing basis. ACTIVITIES To achieve these objectives, the RPP has: • Commissioned Assessments of HNP Programs. The RPP has commissioned approximately 20 case studies of HNP interventions or sets of interventions, employing a benefit-incidence approach to examine the interventions’ distributional performance. These 20 were selected through professional peer review from nearly 150 applications received in response to an openly- and internationally-distributed call for proposal. • Collected and Disseminated Information about HNP program assessments done by others. A global conference brought together both RPP-supported investigators and other researchers in order to produce policy-relevant findings based on the full range of available HNP program assessments employing a benefit-incidence approach. In all, the 36 conference presentations covered well over 100 HNP and other social programs. REPORTS The four principal reports produced by the RPP are all available in full at this site. They are: Monograph. - a 26-page publication, prepared in cooperation with the Population Reference Bureau, that includes examples of the Program-sponsored case studies and explains how the approach used in these studies for the monitoring of how well health activities reach the poor. ( English | Français | Español) Journal. A 40-page special issue of the World Bank Institute’s periodical Development Outreach, with a full summary, and non-technical articles on several projects identified by the Program. (English)
Book. A 350-age volume feature more technical presentations of Program-selected case studies, along with introductory chapters dealing with why the studies were undertaken, why they were done, and what they found. (English | Español)
PRINCIPAL FINDING Health programs do not have to be inequitable. While most health, nutrition, and population services exacerbate poor-rich inequalities by achieving much lower coverage among disadvantaged than among the better-off, many significant and instructive exceptions exist. These demonstrate the feasibility of reaching the poor much more effectively than at present, and point to promising strategies for doing so. |
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