The PRSP: What was wrong with it?
The organisers (Commonwealth Secretariat and Economic Research Group) of the meeting on that unfortunate day, perhaps, had anticipated that professional exchanges would take place among the participants about the PRSP. Unfortunately, that did not happen due to the minister's rejection of the report and the way he did it.
Like many development researchers I have been waiting with great interest to see the outcome of the PRSP in Bangladesh. With my background on this subject, over the last thirty years, I can claim that I understand the poverty issue reasonably well. I will come back to this point later, but let us see, first, why both the local and international development experts took PRSP seriously, not only in Bangladesh but also in the least developed world.
During the last half a century, the multilateral agencies, including the World Bank, have been working tirelessly to overcome poverty in the developing world. Among all these initiatives, at least two are regraded as being highly successful: food-grain availability from both demand and supply side point of view.
On the demand side, the population control measures initiated in the 1950s, and adopted subsequently, had effectively checked population growth and in turn lowered the relative demand for food grains over the last forty years.
On the supply side, the so-called "green revolution," again initiated in the 1950s (the role of Manila based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and subsequently the BRRI for Bangladesh in particular), had successfully increased food grain production manyfold during the last four decades. It is needless to say these policy measures had been supportive in keeping the food grain prices within the reach of the poor. Both these programs have been based on technological innovations, covering the areas of medical and agricultural sciences.
The institutional side of poverty alleviation, globally, has been mainly taken care of by the World Bank during the last fifty years. Within this time frame, the Bank had initiated at least half a dozen strategies to alleviate poverty. For example, IRD Program, Basic Needs Approach, Growth with Equity, Structural Adjustment Program, and so on. After so much investment in resources and time, unfortunately, none of these strategies can claim genuine success the way the demand and supply side policies did. It will not be an exaggeration if one maintains that the institutional side of the poverty alleviation game has been a dismal failure. For this, after investing so much time and resources, the failure on the part of the WB profoundly comes to mind.
A few years back, when the WB initiated the PRSP mechanism, many had taken this strategy seriously, both at the Bank and in the least developed nations. The PRSP's journey in Bangladesh, indeed, began with a bumpy ride. Some even argue that the PRSP is dead in this country. One does not have to elaborate further why this is the case. Dr Moyeen Khan, a high profile educator-cum-minister, has branded the over 300-page PRSP as "worthless" since it failed to include the ICT's role in alleviating poverty in the 21st century. Who was right? Dr Khan or the WB?
At this stage, let me mention that I had the privilege of participating the 8th meeting of the UN ICT Task Force, held in Dublin, Ireland, from April 13-14, 2005. The Task Force, established by the UN Secretary-General in 2001, is a multi-stakeholder partnership, bringing together representatives of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organisations in a global effort to harness the immense potential of ICT for promoting development.
The Dublin meeting was aimed at "harnessing the potential of ICTs for education." The whole idea was, as mentioned by the Executive Coordinator of the Task Force, "the falling costs of ICTs have made the use of ICT for education more economical and, as costs fall even further, the case for their use is set to become compelling in even the poorest of countries." Although the meeting had addressed primarily the issues of ICT for education, one of the keynote speakers, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, talked about the ICT and its role in poverty alleviation and it was regarded as a major input to the meeting.
Having said that, one may ask how it was possible for the Bank to ignore such an important issue in the PRSP? Can we really blame the minister for his outburst? Moreover, it is professionally disturbing to see how such a major omission escaped the World Bank's scrutiny before the release of the report.
Who is to be blamed for the PRSP debacle? It is easy to attack the consultants for their incompetence, but at the end of the day it is the WB that must take the major responsibility. What does it mean? It means that while the Bank speaks loud about the accountability and the transparency for good governance, the preacher appears to be the main offender. Also, one can legitimately raise the question, who was in charge when such a high profile report was outsourced for its preparation? It is generally the practice in the profession that such a document should have an independent review under an embargo before its release. The review should have included at least three types of stakeholders: government, industry and civil society. Obviously, it seems that the paper had not gone through such a rigorous scrutiny.
Unfortunately, with the PRSP's bumpy start, the governments (present and future) would be unlikely to seriously take the recommendations of the report for halving poverty by 2015. The lessons from the document are clear. The multilateral development agencies must realise the fact that while outsourcing is a cost cutting measure, it is, however, professionally dangerous to adopt such a measure which can backfire. It is not easy to introduce competition in the market place for intellectual capacity building. The answer must lie, first and foremost, with building the in-house capacity of the WB.
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