March 15, 2000
Abidjan - The World Bank and IMF intend to monitor the impact of aid programmes on poverty reduction more closely and will strengthen co-operation with other donors and civil society to ensure programmes have the desired effect, senior officials said yesterday.
"It sounds very simple but it represents a major change," John Page of the bank's economic policies department said. "Aid agencies tend to focus on inputs rather than impacts. Intermediate goalposts are a way of measuring success," he said. Page and other bank and International Monetary Fund officials were addressing media at a seminar in Cí´te d'Ivoire on poverty reduction.
Anthony Boote of the IMF's policy development and review department said the donors were responding to "considerable evidence that programmes only work if they are 'owned' by the countries concerned". That did not necessarily mean governments.
Officials suggested aid might be better used if it bypassed government bureaucracies - for example, if money was transferred to local communities for teachers to be hired by locally accountable people.
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