By Nicole Winfield
April 4, 2000
United Nations - The United Nations on Tuesday singled out bad governance - not a lack of cash - in the world's poorest countries as the main reason why they haven't been able to pull themselves out of poverty. A U.N. Development Program report called for governments to develop national anti-poverty programs that tackle an entire range of related issues, not just the problem of how to increase incomes.
If governments take this initiative, they will fill the "missing link" of good government and set their countries on the road to alleviating poverty, the report found. "Money has been thrown at poverty reduction, unfortunately in decreasing amounts nowadays, but ... what has been missing has been the organized policy environment at the national level to put in place anti-poverty strategies," UNDP administrator, Mark Malloch Brown, told a news conference. "What this report clearly demonstrates is that governance is a critical building block for poverty reduction," he said.
All governments need to be democratic and accountable to their people and they should be decentralized so that local authorities have a key role in running poverty programs, said Stephen Browne, director of UNDP's poverty elimination division. While the report's key finding was that ineffective governance gets in the way of poverty-fighting initiatives, UNDP also found that the initiatives themselves are sometimes part of the problem.
Programs to help the poor should be driven by an individual country's needs, not the whims of donors who often look for quick-fix projects rather than investing in sustainable programs with local administration, said the report, "Overcoming Human Poverty: UNDP Poverty Report 2000." "Poverty plans have worked better when they're not simply large clusters of micro-projects which may be focused on particular areas or particular groups," Browne said. "They don't add up. The whole is almost invariably less than the sum of the parts," he said.
The report also calls for the world's wealthy countries to provide debt relief to the developing world - but not at the expense of reducing direct aid and not with a new host of economic conditions attached. And it urges wealthy countries open up their markets to poorer nations, saying the "formidable walls of protection," should be eased. As in previous reports, the UNDP called for the world's poorer nations to establish anti-poverty policies with specific targets, saying the creation of a program can often be a galvanizing force in poverty reduction. The report found that 77 percent of countries surveyed had poverty estimates, but that only 31 percent had actual targets and dates to eradicate or substantially reduce the problem.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
