PRESS BRIEFING BY UN DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY UN DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME

Governance was the critical building block for poverty reduction, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator, Mark Malloch Brown, told correspondents at the launching of the report, “Overcoming Human Poverty: UNDP Poverty Report 2000”, at a Headquarters press briefing this afternoon. Also present were Stephen Browne, Director, UNDP’s Social Development and Poverty Elimination Division; and Terry McKinley, Coordinator of the report.

The report was important in terms of skewering the “odd” United Nations debate that the UNDP was getting out of poverty and into governance work, Mr. Malloch Brown said. The report demonstrated that an organized policy environment at the national level had been the missing element for putting in place anti-poverty strategies that would ensure social equity and lead to poverty reduction. “That’s what the new UNDP is about -- helping countries put in place the policy environment and the institutions to ensure governance for human development or governance for poverty reduction”, he said.

The poverty report was a technical report for practitioners, he added, which would help them understand both the tools and issues necessary for poverty reduction. The launching of the report affirmed the broader dimension that there was no poverty reduction without growth, a view that was not yet second nature at the United Nations.

The remarkable success of countries in East and South-East Asia in reducing poverty was based on very strong growth rates combined with increasing equity, Mr. Malloch Brown said. Other regions with strong growth rates, however, had not succeeded in reducing poverty because the strong growth rates had not been coupled with the right policy environment.

Following the introduction of the Secretary-General’s Millennium Report, the launching of UNDP’s Poverty Report was a reminder that the United Nations system, with the UNDP playing a major role, was committed to putting in place the global policies and arrangements necessary to ensure high rates of global growth, Mr. Malloch Brown said. High growth rates were indispensable to the overall target of the report and of United Nations conferences to cut world poverty in half by 2015.

Stephen Browne, Director of UNDP’s Social Development and Poverty Elimination Division, added that the report did three things. First, it looked at the progress made over the last five years since the 1995 World Summit for Social Development. Second, it examined the nature and effectiveness of national poverty strategies that had been implemented in the wake of the last Summit. Third, the report focused on governance as the “missing link” between effective planning and effective poverty reduction.

On the issue of progress, three commitments had been made by countries at the last Social Summit, he said. One commitment was that countries would make their own estimates of overall and extreme poverty. Countries made the commitment to set the goals and targets by which poverty would be eliminated or reduced. Governments also committed themselves to creating national plans for poverty reduction. The report found that 77 per cent of countries, more than three quarters, had nationally recognized estimates for poverty, Mr. Browne said. UNDP’s approach was to invite countries to draw up their own estimates. Against those estimates, only 31 per cent of countries actually had targets and dates to eliminate or substantially reduce poverty. On planning, 69 per cent of the 140 countries surveyed in the report had incorporated poverty into development planning. Less than one third of the countries in the report had explicit, stand-alone poverty plans.

On the issue of effectiveness, the report states that poverty plans had worked better where they were multi-sexual, multidisciplinary and encompassed different parts of the country, he explained. Poverty plans also worked better where they were not simply large clusters of micro projects. “The whole is almost invariably less than the sum of the parts in such cases”, he said.

Highlighting governance as the missing link in poverty reduction, the report emphasized the importance of democracy, he said. Aspects of democracy included regular elections, both at the national and subnational level, and accountability in public finances. The report also called for the reduction in the diversion of funds through corrupt practices.

A major theme of the report was the emphasis on decentralization of responsibility for governance down to the local government level, he continued. In the report, decentralization referred not merely to “deconcentration”, but to a genuine “devolution” of responsibilities and resources.

Another key point emphasized by the report was the empowerment of those targeted in poverty-reduction strategies, he said. In writing the report, the UNDP had tried to avoid the language of “targeting” and said rather that “an empowered poor was necessarily a targeted poor” because they were able to participate in local decision making. One of the conclusions of the report was that, in many cases, communities did not need more resources -- they needed more empowerment, he said.

Poverty was not just a national-level problem, said Mr. McKinley, the report coordinator. The report also focussed on the very important international dimension of poverty. At the same time that halving poverty by 2015 was being recommended as a global target, donor countries were reducing official development assistance. Trade was not yet on the agenda. Developing countries could not service their heavy external debts without being able to generate foreign exchange. Much could be done just in terms of removing the protectionism in rich countries that were preventing the exports from developing countries.

A correspondent asked how long governance had been a part of UNDP’s thinking and if it implied that countries that did not meet standards for good governance should be denied assistance. Mr. Browne replied that while one could not put a starting date on such thinking, there had been an evolution in UNDP’s understanding of governance since the last Summit. Such thinking also went more hand in hand with UNDP’s more governance-oriented mandate and with a broadened interpretation of “human poverty”, a term coined and conceived with the UNDP Human Development Report in 1997. Looking at the individual and his or her individual empowerment was central to the philosophy of the UNDP and had been for a while. There were those who said that governance was a question of local political will that was difficult to influence, he continued. What the report could do was open the dialogue between UNDP and its partner countries, and point out that it was not merely a question of getting the economics right -- it was a question of getting political and social governance right. Policy dialogue would be a part of the follow-up to the report.

Asked whether they had received an initial reaction from governments and non-governmental organizations on the report, Mr. Browne said that they had not. He did not want to make it seem that the report had come from nowhere. The report was based on a long-term dialogue with countries over the last two to three years. In 1996, the year following the last Summit, the UNDP drew up the Poverty Strategy Initiative, one of the means of engaging programme countries in a dialogue. While the report was couched in terms that were intended to give impetus to the debate, nothing in the report should surprise the countries mentioned in the report. Regarding non-governmental organizations, the report would be launched through a series of seminars in the coming weeks.

In terms of the international link and the role of the richer countries, could you encapsulate what you would like the richer countries to do? a correspondent asked. Mr. McKinley said that it was a concern on the part of developing countries that they were being offered debt relief at the same time that aid was being reduced. There had been no net gain for developing countries. Another major concern was the issue of conditionality. Developing countries were being asked to engage in trade liberalization, and open up their agricultural sectors to imports, for example. At the same time, the industrial countries were not willing to do the same. To have a more level-playing field, opening up some of the markets in the wealthier, industrial countries would have a substantial impact on poverty. Although official development assistance should be raised, the real issue was focusing aid on poverty.

Asked to characterize how the report might be received by developing countries and whether there would be an acknowledgement by the developing world that they had a big role to play in getting their house in order, Mr. Browne said that the report made clear that poverty reduction began at home. Since 1996, the UNDP had been engaged with a number of countries in formulating poverty-reduction strategies. That involvement had been given new impetus over the last six months with the appearance of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), a statutory requirement of the Bretton Woods institutions for further concessionary assistance. The UNDP was concerned that it should not come along with too much additional conditionality.

The immediate reaction of many countries to a PRSP would be to turn to the UNDP for assistance in formulating poverty-reduction strategies, he continued. Part of the reaction to the poverty report would be along those same lines. Countries would also react with a better understanding of the difficult decisions they would have to make outside of the economic sphere, and they would turn to an organization, such as the UNDP, to help them.

In response to a question on “corrupt” governance systems, Mr. McKinley said that the report made the point that there should be more emphasis on local governments to follow through on decentralization. The report also made that point that there had not been enough emphasis on the community organizations of the poor. At the local community level, the poor needed resources to help build up their own capacities.

Asked to account for the fact that some of the major successes in poverty reduction had taken place in countries that were not traditional, multi-party democracies, Mr. Browne said that what was important was a measure of accountability that did not necessarily depend on formal multi-party elections. Governance went down to the community level. Vibrant civil society, education and literacy levels accounted for a great deal.

In reference to corrupt government practices, was he suggesting that international funds should go to local governments and not to main governments? a correspondent asked. It was not as simple as that, Mr. Browne said. While there had been a tendency for foreign assistance to sometimes bypass the federal government system, it was not necessarily the panacea. It was more important to work through government partners and with civil society organizations to ensure that resources were well used. One of UNDP’s key roles was bringing civil society into the dialogue about national poverty strategies. Bringing different parties around the table would ensure greater transparency and knowledge on how resources were used.

Was there a different poverty line for rich countries versus poor countries? a correspondent asked. Mr. Browne responded that $1 per day was the universal poverty line. While the UNDP used $1 per day for international comparison, it preferred to talk more about the concept of human poverty. It was possible for a country to achieve a reduction in income poverty and still be mired in many aspects of human poverty.

Asked to clarify a chart in the report that implied that the Niger was the poorest country, Mr. McKinley said that it was a limited sample from the 1999 Human Development Report, which would have since been updated to include more countries. Poverty had many different dimensions. There was a traditional measure of income poverty, in which case many countries might be considered income poor. Looking at human poverty indicators, however, might produce a different pattern. The value of such indices, in addition to income poverty lines, was that it provided more information to deal with the real problems.

* *** *