Monitoring a country’s progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is an important part of turning ambition into reality. The experience of establishing Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) provides a number of lessons for country-level monitoring. Good practice requires the ongoing involvement of a range of both government and civil society stakeholders.

Research from the Institute of Development Studies and the Overseas Development Institute reviews interim and full PRSPs for countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The authors focus on the creation of systems for monitoring progress towards the goals of poverty reduction. They recommend a number of principles for choosing realistic indicators and effective monitoring systems.

PRSPs were introduced in the late 1990s. The poorest and most heavily indebted countries were to produce these papers as part of the process of qualifying for debt relief. By mid-2002 there were 59 countries involved in the process.

The authors identify the following monitoring issues as being key:

• Monitoring levels of planned and actual government expenditure, in areas such as health and education, is important. The effectiveness of this monitoring will depend on there first being reform of the budget systems under which allocations are made to increase transparency and accountability.
• Few of the countries are in a position to provide data showing how public money is actually spent on a sector by sector basis.
• PRSPs routinely identify official statistics as an important source of data for monitoring progress in reducing poverty, but they do not address the need for improvements in the quality of collection and reliability of such data.
• Insufficient account is taken of less traditional methods of data collection, such as beneficiary focus groups and simple service delivery surveys. These methods allow for an important element of feedback while the policy is still being implemented and of highlighting problems while there is still time to act on them.
• Often PRSPs lack a clear rationale for selecting the indicators used for measuring progress. There is little evidence of community involvement in the choice of indicators.

The authors make a number of recommendations about the process of establishing monitoring systems:

• It is important to adopt a genuinely multidimensional approach to monitoring poverty reduction policy outcomes, one that is not wholly focused on income levels but also takes into account other factors including health, education and nutrition.
• Monitoring the final outcomes of a policy is useful, but it is equally important to focus on monitoring the process through which the policy is implemented. The ‘missing middle’ – the lack of a clearly specified chain of causation between policy and intended outcome – is reflected in the lack of process indicators.
• Expenditures should be monitored in a way which isn’t narrowly focused on budget formulation but follows through to show how the funds are actually spent, what proportion reaches the intended destination (such as schools and clinics) and to the extent possible the resulting outputs or outcomes.
• The selection indicators and design of monitoring systems should involve a wide range of stakeholders, including governments, donors and civil society organisations.
• There is need for considerable work on improving the poor quality of data collection and management information systems in many countries.

The advent of PRSPs has brought new concerns to the attention of policy-makers in developing countries. Emphasis has shifted towards in-country ownership and has opened up discussion among stakeholders about the ways and means of addressing poverty reduction goals. Although thinking on monitoring in the PRSPs remains is in its early stages, it does provide some useful lessons for tracking country-level progress towards the MDGs.

Source(s):
‘Monitoring Progress Towards the Millennium Development Goals at Country Level’ by David Booth and Henry Lucas in Richard Black and Howard White (eds) ‘Targeting Development: Critical Perspectives on the Millennium Development Goals’, London: Routledge, 2004

id21 Research Highlight: 9 September 2004

Further Information:
Henry Lucas
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 1273 606261
Fax: +44 (0) 1273 621202/691647
Contact the contributor: h.lucas@ids.ac.uk

Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK

David Booth
Overseas Development Institute
111 Westminster Bridge Road
London SE1 7JD

Tel: +44 (0) 20 79220300
Fax: +44 (0) 20 79220399
Contact the contributor: d.booth@odi.org.uk

Overseas Development Institute, UK

Other related links:
'Far from the front line: how likely is universal primary completion by 2015?'

'Tackling performance - monitoring policy effectiveness in the Sri Lankan health system'

'Building Capacity to Measure and Monitor MDGs'

'Achieving the MDGs and related outcomes: a framework for monitoring policies and actions background paper'

Good practice in the development of PRSP indicators and monitoring systems