Building upon the foundation established in 2006 through a regional workshop on the MDGs, in 2007, the UNDP Pacific Centre - in collaboration with other UN Agencies and UNDP Regional Centres in Colombo and Bangkok - organised two sub regional workshops on MDG-based planning, costing and budgeting. The first workshop was organised in Pohnpei, FSM in June 2007, and aimed at strengthening national capacities in linking policy, planning and budgeting in the North Pacific countries of the Federated States of Micronesia (all four States), Palau, the Republic of Marshall Islands and Kiribati.

The second workshop had a similar focus and was held in Honiara, Solomon Islands for the West Pacific countries of Fiji, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Nauru and Solomon Islands. The Polynesian sub regional MDG workshop held in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, in May 2008 is therefore the third and last in the series of sub regional workshops. The workshop targeted government and non government participants from Niue, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga and Cook Islands.

The workshop was designed to strengthen national capacities in understanding poverty and hardship and the MDGs, and how different types of policies can contribute to poverty reduction and achievement of national priorities and the MDGs. Understanding how to put together an MDG-based national sustainable development strategy (NSDS) or national plan, and aligning resource allocation mechanisms to overarching policies was part of the workshop objective. In this respect, the experience of the Philippines on planning and budgeting, including gender responsive budgeting, was both practical and interesting. Given the vulnerability of Pacific Islands Countries to natural disasters and the rising prices of oil, environment and energy featured prominently in the workshop sessions. The highlight of the workshop was the introduction of a number of sectoral needs assessment / costing tools to enable countries to identify sectoral priorities and estimate the resource requirement to finance implementation of interventions in these key areas. There was strong interest in the following needs assessment / costing tools: education, health, HIV, environment, energy and gender, and countries have requested follow up training in-country so that more national counterparts can be trained to use the tools.

The workshop had a strong focus on gender, with specific sessions on gender responsive policies, gender responsive budgeting and the introduction of the gender costing tool.

Gender was also addressed and mainstreamed in other sessions, including on disaster risk reduction.