Document(s) 4 of 10

“The availability of good statistics and the capacity of governments, donors and international organizations to systematically measure, monitor and report on progress in all social and economic spheres are at the heart of development policy and the achievement of the MDGs.”

— The Millennium Development Goals Report 2007 (UN 2007, p. 34)

For more than two decades, governments and development agencies around the world have focused on reducing poverty. Although tremendous strides have been made, approximately one in four people in developing countries continues to live below the World Bank’s international poverty line of US$1.25 per day (Chen and Ravallion 2008). Progress has also been markedly uneven, ranging from the dramatic success experienced in East Asia (notably China), to relatively slower progress in South Asia and Latin America, to deeper poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

Material deprivation based on income and consumption measures forms only part of the picture. Understanding and measuring the well-being of the poor also requires a more multi-faceted approach that takes into account other kinds of deprivation, such as health, education, access to public goods and services, security, freedom, and human rights. While national and global accounts are critical benchmarks, poverty and inequality are more accurately measured and understood within the specific geographical, economic, social, and political contexts in which people live, at household and community levels.

Wise public investment is key to reducing poverty and addressing inequalities within society. Timely and accurate data is required to measure progress and plan for that investment. It is also essential for good analysis and policy application. As The Millennium Development Goals Report 2007 states, “Sound national statistical systems and enhanced public accountability are necessary to support all these efforts” (UN 2007). And as Christopher Scott of the London School of Economics notes, “Strengthening the evidence base of policy-making in developing countries has always been important, but it has become particularly crucial in the current period…. No less than 55 countries lack information on the share of the population living in poverty [and] nearly double that number have no data on poverty trends, so that progress towards the MDGs cannot be tracked directly over time” (Scott 2005).

In much of the developing world, the lack of appropriate local information about the poor hinders development planning and programs, and constrains efforts to monitor change. This book presents one system, developed with IDRC support, that can help governments formulate more effective poverty programs and monitor their impact, as well as measure progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Known as the Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS), this system shows that a meaningful approach to understanding and tackling poverty requires involving local communities in public policy decisions.

As we explain, good public policy choices for empowering and uplifting the poor are best made when local authorities and communities work together and are guided by sound data and evidence-based analysis. This, we argue, is key to ensuring effective public spending and greater public accountability.

The research presented in this book stresses that the poor must be involved in planning public programs that affect their livelihoods and well-being. Policy decisions must respond to their concerns, build on their knowledge and experience, and consider them as participants in the policy process. Engaging communities to work with local authorities to monitor and use locally obtained, verifiable information about actual living conditions for planning purposes is what many CBMS practitioners refer to as “localizing the MDGs.”

Measuring and monitoring poverty

Throughout the 1990s, the international development community was galvanized to improve perspectives on poverty by better understanding the multi-dimensional nature of poverty, as well as its distribution and depth. In part, this was driven by research from international agencies showing that the poor and vulnerable were adversely affected by external shocks and macroeconomic adjustment and needed special attention when formulating public policies (see, for example, Jolly 1991). The World Bank’s 1990 World Development Report: Poverty (WDR) was particularly instrumental in focusing international attention on poverty in developing countries and on strategies for targeting the poor. It highlighted dimensions of poverty other than income, the characteristics of the poor — who they are, where they live, and what factors contribute to their poverty (such as lack of assets, education, and health) — as well as issues of inequality. The report also generated attention around measuring poverty through improved statistical surveys and poverty estimations.

However, for the most part, monetary measures for assessing poverty remained dominant and shaped poverty-reduction approaches, even those promoted through more “Comprehensive Development Frameworks” and the “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers” (PRSPs) process that largely replaced the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank. Less progress was made in evolving strategies and policies that responded significantly to the underlying processes by which the poor remained in poverty, or moved out of it.

While governments continued to emphasize top-down approaches to address poverty and largely income- and consumption-driven national poverty-reduction programs, there was growing recognition of the importance of targeting the poor and of the need to better understand the “micro” aspects and “dynamics” of poverty.

A decade after the 1990 WDR, the World Bank revisited the progress made toward reducing poverty and advocated a more comprehensive, inclusive, and pro-poor driven approach. The WDR 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, led by economist Ravi Kanbur, was a much more comprehensive analysis of poverty and marked an important departure: it broadened the concept of poverty to include vulnerability, the dynamics of powerlessness, and risk — what Amartya Sen referred to as “the capabilities that a person has…to lead the kind of life he or she values” (Sen 1999).

The inclusion of participatory and combined methods of poverty monitoring, such as household surveys and capability measures, were introduced to provide a more accurate and “experiential” view of poverty as felt and expressed by the poor themselves. Measures of factors such as powerlessness, security, and other participatory dimensions highlighted the importance of “governance and accountability” in the poverty debate. It also emphasized the importance of context in understanding poverty, the views of those who are experiencing poverty, and the means and policies needed to address it.

The importance of measuring and monitoring the multi-dimensional aspects of poverty — and of measurements for assessing progress toward the MDGs — is now widely accepted. However, there is conspicuously less consensus on the empirical applications of methodologies, or agreement on how to translate this into operational policies. As the WDR 2000/2001 points out, “Developing countries need to prepare their own mix of policies to reduce poverty, reflecting national priorities and local realities. Choices will depend on the economic, sociopolitical, structural, and cultural context of individual countries — indeed, individual communities.” But, paradoxically, the World Bank and the international donor community have continued to lead in developing poverty frameworks in most recipient countries, largely without locally driven research perspectives.

It is in this context of trying to understand and apply local perspectives of poverty to development strategies that CBMS evolved. Its origins and development as an approach to bridging methods of poverty measurement with strategies for evidence-based planning, accountable public investment, and community empowerment, are explained in Part 2. The development of CBMS is not linear, however, nor is it a blueprint. As the country experiences described in Part 3 show, CBMS works best where institutional and political factors at the local community level are supportive.

Generating information for accountability

Poverty-reduction strategies require measuring and continually monitoring the dynamics of well-being. Involving the poor in this process is vital. The institutional and social context by which the poor can express their voice through their communities and have their information meaningfully communicated for better public service delivery is fundamental. This ensures that public resources are effectively used and that accountability and local governance are strengthened.

Governments are responsible for providing public goods and services that can reduce poverty. However, as research has shown throughout the developing world, the allocation of public resources for development does not itself ensure that services are provided, efficiently or at all, or are accessible to the poor. The poor, the providers, and the policymakers need to be effectively linked and the relationships between them mediated by institutions that favour inclusiveness and a framework of accountability.

Decentralization and subsidiarity — the principle that states that matters should be handled by the smallest (or the lowest) competent authority — often facilitate such a framework because they empower the poor by providing them with better information. According to the World Bank, this transfer of political, fiscal, and administrative functions from national to sub-national governments has emerged as one of the most important trends in development policy. Decentralization has also been widely supported by donors as a means to broaden public participation and local ownership of development programs (Jütting et al. 2004).

While an important enabling condition, decentralization of public functions in and of itself does not assure the necessary conditions for poverty reduction, especially where institutional and legal frameworks are weak, political will is lacking, and there is little public accountability. Research has shown that decentralization has led to different poverty outcomes, depending on how well local governments have been able to execute federal functions, the commitment to reforms, and how social institutions and political structures have supported local participation in development programs. Critical to this process is the role of information in raising citizens’ awareness of how public resources are allocated, by whom, and under what conditions.

The Philippines is one country where decentralization has had a significantly positive impact on service delivery and poverty reduction. Other Asian countries, such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia, are also moving down this path. Yet, where institutional or political factors are not supportive, where there is less transparency around public expenditures, or where capacity does not exist to implement policies, decentralization may not have the desired outcomes (Jütting et al. 2004).

Many countries in Africa, as we discuss in Part 3, are still at early stages of decentralization. The key challenges they face include the clear assignment of functions; the development of effective fiscal transfer mechanisms; the accountability of local governments; and the capacity of local governments to effectively plan, manage, and monitor public resources.

Experience has shown that, over the long run, CBMS is most effective where the provision of public goods is decentralized to local governments and where local communities participate in the policy-making process by providing information about their needs and aspirations. This linkage also helps to generate important feedback on the impacts of policy interventions, enabling policymakers to make more informed decisions in the future.

Local ownership of development

Despite the push for a “pro-poor, local development-driven” agenda, few developing countries have actually been in the driver’s seat of the poverty-reduction effort. And this has been acutely reflected in the lack of capacity in local institutions. As IDRC Vice-President Rohinton Medora has noted, “Little was done to build indigenous capacity for research and policy analysis,” a crucial element to sustain efforts to measure and analyze poverty.

The promise that poverty assessment and poverty-reduction programs will become locally owned has long been a guiding principle of the OECD Development Assistance Committee of donors. Yet, despite the rhetoric, the PRSPs, and the glossy reports from international development agencies, the process of development planning remains largely asymmetric in favour of donor approaches. Only recently have there emerged poverty-reduction agendas based on locally conducted research and capacity-building activities that are nationally based and funded. These are particularly evident in emerging economies such as Thailand. Fundamental to this transition has been the generation of local knowledge within institutes of higher learning and research organizations.

There are no shortcuts to building local capacity. However, some paths are being firmly laid and followed by others in the developing regions of the world. This book shows how one local network of developing-country researchers was created out of a need to counteract this asymmetry and to establish ownership over local information and knowledge. It also describes how this eventually transformed into a dynamic relationship involving local governments and local communities for meaningful development planning. This is about the experience of the CBMS network of researchers in systematically collecting and analyzing locally generated information to better understand the impacts of public policies and programs on the poor.

According to Christopher Scott, establishing an effective institutional framework to deliver evidence-based policy-making is a long, slow process for most countries. CBMS can help reduce that time and fill in gaps. As explained in Part 2 and illustrated in Part 3, CBMS is a system that effectively increases the capacity of local government administrations to plan and budget, to monitor programs and projects, and to report on MDG targets with a high degree of reliability and precision. It also enables local government agencies to design targeted poverty alleviation programs and other public interventions that are responsive to, and can be tracked by, communities. In doing so, it empowers the poor.

Document(s) 4 of 10