By Brian Kenety

 The Organisation for Co-Operation and Development (OECD) is in the process of crafting a comprehensive set of development policy guidelines to foster coherence among its  member states and to have the agenda come from the recipients rather than the donors.  Senior officials responsible for poverty reduction, development and co-operation with non-OECD members held a public briefing here today to provide a rough outline of a working document to be presented for closed debate at the OECD headquarters in Paris next week.   Titled ‘Poverty Reduction through Policy Coherence,’ the paper attempts to draw on the expertise of developing in defining and reducing .

Dag Ehrenpreis, Senior Advisor on Poverty Reduction within the Development and Co-operation Directorate of the OECD, said an attempt had been made to fashion a “multi-dimensional,” common working definition of poverty for OECD donors to refer to.  Ehrenpreis. said the paper recognised it was important to distinguish between the newly poor and the chronically poor, those whose families had been poor for generations, and define the economic, demographic and social reasons for poverty.  “The point we are making is that donors should make an effort to form a picture of the greatest need, compiling a check-list of what should be looked at, as a basis for dialogue between partners and non-governmental organisations (NGOs),” he said, “a framework, pointing to the different  linkages (between external and internal factors of poverty.” 

Ehrenpreis stressed that developing countries clearly considered coherence among donor’s policies as crucial, and that granting aid with one hand while preventing developing countries access to their markets with the other was counterproductive.  He said that supporting developing countries concerns at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was a top priority identified in the paper, along with specialised and differential treatment for the Least-Developed Countries, access to affordable medicines to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases which plague the developing world, and strict controls on trade and manufacture of small arms and light weapons. 

The OECD Council at Ministerial level, which met earlier this week in Paris, said in a communiqué Jun 27 that it considered poverty reduction strategies and partnerships as the basis for the significantly increased debt reduction effort for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) agreed last year by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  “Improved policy coherence within OECD countries is also necessary if developing countries are to take full advantage of the opportunities of globalisation.

OECD will develop a Checklist on Policy Coherence to assist its Member countries in this area. The OECD will also deepen its analytical work on the linkages between trade liberalisation, economic growth and poverty reduction,” said the communiqué. 

The poverty reduction programme, designed in consultation with civil society, is meant to ensure that countries put the money that would have gone to servicing the debts into development programmes, with an emphasis on education and health, and that they work with the World Bank and the IMF on refining economic policies. 

Countries that have already qualified for the HIPC Initiative, or are likely to do so in the near future, will be those expected to first produce a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, which in the words of then IMF Acting Managing Director Stanley Fischer, “are necessary to ensure that  anti-poverty strategies are in place - before debt relief happens - so we make sure that the debt relief is well-used, for the purposes intended.”  In a sense, the OECD ‘Checklist’ is designed to ensure a similar degree of planning on the part of the donors.

The final paper, due to be adopted by June 2001, will spell out specific guidelines on poverty reduction, “as well as further guidance on implementing partnership principles in ways that improve public governance in partner countries.”   Raundi Halvorson-Quevedo, OECD Administrator for Poverty Reduction, said that donor countries strategies should “ally” with the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, “but recognise they will have their own strategies.” Therefore, donor countries should make every effort to share information, statistics and analysis with the recipient countries and help their own officials based in these countries to “assess performance of both partners,” she said. 

The OECD sees the internationally-agreed development goals set for 2015 for poverty reduction and social and environmental progress as providing a “reference point” and “performance monitoring tool” for both international action and domestic development strategies.  The OECD acknowledges that while real advances have been made in most regions during the 1990s, “many countries, particularly the poorest, will not achieve the goals without major domestic efforts and international support.” 

It sees a commitment to respect for human rights, including gender equality and the empowerment of women, as an integral part of development co-operation, and vital for sustainable poverty reduction.  Stephanie Baile, Principal Administrator of the OECD Strategic Management of Development Co-operation Division, noted that to date there has been little said that it was clear that women and the poorest of the poor had been “systematically bypassed” by official development assistance and that debt relief is a necessary pre-condition for development for many developing countries .

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