Until countries set targets to measure progress, it is
difficult to believe that they are mounting a concerted
campaign to address poverty.
UNDP Poverty Report 2000 comes at a time of great change in the global conditions for poverty reduction - and in the roles of multilateral development agencies. As UNDP restructures to become more streamlined and effective, it continues striving - like many institutions in the international development community -to become more poverty focused. Yet as the efforts intensify, the target grows. The number of income-poor in the developing world is again on the rise - estimated to exceed 1.2 billion in 1998 after having declined until 1996.
A new global strategy clearly needs to be mounted - with more resources, a sharper focus and a stronger commitment. The international community has to squarely face the task of reforming the global enabling environment to accelerate poverty reduction. Developing countries - weighed down by external debt, starved of private capital and technology, blocked from rich-country markets and faced with declining official development assistance - cannot be expected to go into battle without reinforcements. They are being encouraged to launch a full-scale campaign against poverty while their budgets are being put on a "poverty diet".
UNDP faces its own resource constraints. It can no longer be all things to all people. It remains firmly committed to poverty eradication, but it has to marshal and concentrate its forces to supply the most strategically important means of support to programme countries. It has to provide countries what they most need and what it is best at providing.
In many cases this strategy implies deploying its assistance to improving policy-making and building institutions as the principal means to eradicate poverty. It means concentrating on providing technical advice, backed by resources, on how to make governance structures more participatory, more accountable, more pro-poor.
This approach signifies a new role for the state, built on new partnerships with civil society and the private sector. The heavy bureaucracy of the developmental state is being left behind in the 20th century. But the new, "underweight" model will not survive long into the 21st. Its prescriptions have delivered neither sustained growth nor social justice. The new state has to actively promote social justice and encourage civil society and the private sector to do the same. And it has to wield the latest techniques, such as those made possible by information and communications technologies, to achieve this end.
UNDP remains guided by the poverty eradication commitments made at the 1995 World Summit for Social Development. The United Nations General Assembly's upcoming five-year review of the Social Summit outcomes provides an excellent opportunity to take stock of accomplishments and remaining tasks. We already know that the pace of the campaign needs to quicken if we are to reach our common goals.
Countries made three main commitments at the Social Summit:
- To estimate overall and extreme income poverty.
- To set "time-bound goals and targets" for the substantial reduction of overall poverty and the
eradication of extreme poverty.
- To implement national anti-poverty plans to reach
their targets.
This second Poverty Report evaluates national anti-poverty plans, to draw lessons for the countries implementing these plans and for UNDP's assistance to these efforts. UNDP has to do more to honour its commitments at the Social Summit and learn to provide better assistance - focusing more on helping to improve policies and institutions rather than concentrating on microprojects.
Governance: The Missing Link
The report pays special attention to governance issues. The international development community used to think - or at least acted as though it thought - that if countries could sustain rapid growth, poverty would take care of itself. Then it realized that growth does not always translate into poverty reduction, so it started emphasizing "pro-poor" growth. Now it is becoming clear to many that governance is a key 'missing link" between growth and poverty reduction.
By definition, growth generates more income. But the poor are unlikely to receive a fair share of this increased income if they are not empowered - first economically but also, just as important, socially and politically. Making sure that the poor are treated equitably is the motivation for national poverty programmes. But all too often the funds earmarked for them never arrive. Governments agreed to eradicate poverty and people supported them in doing so, but the governments cannot explain why the resources are not getting to the poor.
In addition to a lack of pro-poor policy-making, the likeliest explanation is a lack of accountability, or simply poor management. In either case the crucial reform has to be in the country's governance structure. Countries firmly committed to eradicating poverty need external support to help them put the systems in place to meet their objectives. But creating these systems cannot be a new "pro-poor" social conditionality to go along with the stack of economic conditionalities that countries already face.
Meeting Capacity-Building Needs
Based on their commitments at the Social Summit, countries produce their own estimates of income poverty, set their own targets and elaborate their own plans. The role of official development assistance is to meet their needs in building the capacity to follow through on their resolutions. Often the needs are for more accountability and transparency in the use of funds -as well as to generate more tax revenue from those who can afford to pay. Countries might also need assistance in carrying out decentralization that promotes greater and more direct participation by the poor. The assistance might be directed to local governments to help them increase their competence, their revenue and their responsiveness to the local electorate. Or countries might need assistance in fostering community participation and stronger organizations for the poor.
Social Summit Commitments
As we approach the General Assembly's five-year review of the Social Summit outcomes in mid-2000, what progress have countries made in fulfilling the commitments they made in 1995? As mentioned, they agreed to have recent estimates of income poverty, to set targets for reducing or eliminating it and to implement plans to achieve these targets. They also implicitly agreed to target different dimensions of human poverty.
Since publication of the first Poverty Report, in October 1998, UNDP's network of country offices has been updating UNDP's information on these commitments.
Of the 140 countries surveyed, 108, or 77%, have estimates of extreme poverty or overall poverty, or both, for the 1990s (table 1.1; see table 1.3 on pages 24–27 for country details). These estimates are supplied by UNDP country offices and are based on official national estimates. The estimates are based on monetary measures of poverty, in terms of income or expenditure - the standards agreed at the Social Summit. Typically, extreme poverty means that a person cannot buy enough food to meet basic nutritional needs (box 1.1). Overall poverty means that a person cannot buy enough food and non-food items to satisfy essential needs, as for nutrition, clothing, energy and housing. So estimates of overall poverty should include estimates of extreme poverty as a subset.
Most Progress in Estimating Poverty
The methods that countries use to estimate income poverty can vary widely, so the results across countries are not comparable. Even for extreme poverty, countries differ on what should be considered minimum average calorie requirements. And some methods are obviously better than others for estimating poverty. What is important is that each country maintain the same definition of poverty and the same method for estimating it so that the country can measure progress and plan its poverty programme accordingly.
Estimates based on some kind of international poverty line, such as that valued at $1 a day per person (in 1985 purchasing power parity prices), can help supply very rough estimates of global trends, but they are not yet reliable enough for national estimates. More important, many countries do not endorse them for their own use.
The region with the highest share of countries having estimates is Latin America and the Caribbean (88%), followed by Asia and the Pacific (83%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (82%). More than three-quarters of these countries have estimates for the last half of the 1990s. Those with estimates only for the early 1990s have a dated picture of poverty conditions.
For extreme poverty the commitment is to eradicate it by a specified year - and for overall poverty, to substantially reduce it by a specified year. The two types of poverty affect different groups. A farmer owning a small plot of land might be poor in overall terms but not destitute, while a landless agricultural labourer might be extremely poor. Anti-poverty interventions tend to have more success in reducing poverty among small farmers, who start out with some assets and marketable skills, than in eliminating poverty among severely disadvantaged landless labourers.
Some Progress in Implementing Plans
Estimating poverty is ordinarily the first step in dealing with it. Some countries then move on to develop anti-poverty plans, another explicit commitment made at the Social Summit. Among the 140 countries, 97 (69%) have explicit, stand-alone poverty plans (29%) or have explicitly incorporated poverty into national planning (40%).
The region with the highest share of countries with some form of plan is Latin America and the Caribbean (81%), followed by Sub-Saharan Africa (73%) and Asia and the Pacific (71%). Only in Sub-Saharan Africa do the countries with explicit poverty plans (19) outnumber those that have made poverty a part of national planning (14).
The nature of the plans varies widely. Some countries have only a strategic document outlining general objectives. Others have formulated programmes to give content to the strategy. Only a minority have action plans to begin implementing the strategy. Countries that do not have explicit poverty plans but incorporate poverty into national planning give varying importance to the issue. Many bury it in their general planning objectives, while a few make poverty reduction the central goal. But in those that have made no estimates of poverty - much less set targets for reducing it - national planning is unlikely to take poverty reduction seriously.
Little Progress in Setting Targets
Anti-poverty plans usually lack flesh and bones if they merely have general, vaguely worded objectives. To be put into action and budgeted, they need time-bound goals and targets - a third major commitment at the Social Summit. But of the 140 countries, only 43 have targets for eradicating extreme poverty or substantially reducing overall poverty (or both) - a mere 31%. Only in Asia and the Pacific have at least half the countries set targets. In Sub-Saharan Africa 42% of countries have targets.
The lack of targets is a serious shortcoming for all countries to address at the General Assembly's five-year review. Until countries set targets to measure progress, it is difficult to believe that they are mounting a concerted campaign to address poverty - or that they can determine how much to budget for poverty programmes.
Several of the national targets are unrealistic, especially for the first half of this decade. Perhaps they were announced merely to satisfy a formal commitment, not designed as goals for concrete action. Or perhaps countries could not foresee the difficulties in the 1990s; those affected by the Asian financial crisis are examples.
The many countries still struggling to revive economic growth have poor prospects of reaching their poverty targets. The trend rate of growth of private consumption per person for 1980–97 provides a basis for judging how likely each country is to reach its declared income poverty target (see table 1.3 on pages 24–27). Regional averages show that for many countries consumption growth would have to accelerate to reach their targets (figure 1.1). In Sub-Saharan Africa consumption per person has been declining by 2.1% a year. In both Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East and North Africa consumption has increased, but by less than 1% a year.
Such indicators as illiteracy among the adult population aged 15 and older can be used to set long-term targets (see table 1.4 on pages 28–29). Female illiteracy among the population aged 15–24 can be used to monitor progress in the short term. If a country has been making recent progress in education - and has been concerned about equity in educational opportunities - the illiteracy rate among young women should be lower than that for the entire adult population.
A similar set of indicators can be used for child malnutrition. For long-term targeting the indicator could be children under five who are underweight (have low weight for their age). For short-term monitoring, especially in crisis situations, it could be child wasting (low weight for height).
For deprivation in life expectancy the indicator for long-term targeting could be the expectation of dying before age 40. The indicator for short-term monitoring could be the expectation of dying before age 15. An alternative would be the probability of dying before age five, or the under-five mortality rate normalized for 100 births. In the majority of countries most mortality up to age 15 occurs before age five. But in a substantial minority, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, mortality rates are significant between ages five and 15.
Tracking Short-Term Changes
All three indicators proposed for long-term targeting— adult illiteracy, the proportion of children under five who are underweight and the probability of dying before age 
40 - are used in the human poverty index devised by UNDP's Human Development Report. The indicators are valuable because they focus on shortfalls or deprivations in basic human capabilities. But additional indicators that can change significantly in the short term can be used as valuable supplements.
The Social Summit set a target of reducing adult illiteracy by half between 1990 and 2000. But many regions are unlikely to reach this target (table 1.2). The same is true for child malnutrition, which was also supposed to be halved between 1990 and 2000 (figure 1.2). In South Asia the percentage of malnourished children remains high, and in Sub-Saharan Africa it has risen.
Progress in life expectancy has also been slow. Many countries are far from reaching an average of 60 years— the Social Summit target for 2000 - and some, such as in Sub-Saharan Africa, are moving backwards. And there was very little progress between 1988 and 1998 towards the proposed target of a 50% reduction in the percentage of the population not expected to reach age 40 (figure 1.3). In the least developed countries about a third of the population will not survive to age 40. There was a similar lack of progress for the percentage of the population not expected to reach age 15 (figure 1.4).
Countries need to know whether they are moving in the right direction. Since some of the indicators cannot change dramatically in the short term, such as adult illiteracy (because it covers large segments of the population whose educational attainment will not change), they should be supplemented by others that can more accurately track recent efforts by countries.
