Pro-poor Policies After
MDGs in Sub-Saharan
Africa
Louis Kasakande
Chief Economist
African Development Bank

Outline of the presentation
1. Highlights of Africa’s progress towards
MDGs
2. Pro-poor policies after MDGs: challenges
3. Rethinking Pro-poor policies after MDGs in
Africa
4. Concluding remarks

1. Highlights of Africa’s progress
towards MDGs
 On average SSA is the region with the
slowest pace of progress towards reaching
targets set in the MDGs.
 However, there are significant disparities
across countries in the progress towards
MDGs
 Some countries have registered rapid
progress towards achieving some targets,
while others recorded much slower progress.
(see Figure below)

Figure 1: Progress towards universal education in selected African
countries

1. Highlights of Africa’s progress
towards MDGs (contd)
 Tracking progress is undermined by lack of
timely and reliable data on targets.
 Despite efforts in generating MDGs-related
data in most African countries, poor quality of
data is still a significant challenge for
monitoring progress in real time.

2. Pro-poor policies after MDGs:
challenges (contd..)
 Little effort has been made to recognize that
most of the targets are means to accelerate
economic prosperity; but often they are
considered as ends in their own right.
 As a result, there is a weak mapping from
targets to policy instruments or vice versa.
 Identifying robust & potent policy instruments
to achieve a set of targets is complicated by
multiplicity of targets

2. Pro-poor policies after MDGs:
challenges (contd)
 MDGs also often lack coherence &
coordination partly because of multiplicity of
players.
 Governments, development agencies (UNDP,
bilateral aid agencies, etc..), NGOs, civil
society organizations have rallied themselves
around MDGs often resulting in duplication of
efforts.
 The multiplicity of players naturally results in
sub-optimal of resources.

3. Rethinking pro-poor policies after
MDGs
 MDGs will continue to be relevant beyond
2015 for a number of reasons:
 As shared vision, they can rally public support
for increased ODA in donor countries;
 They provide a platform for better
development partnership
 The goals are popular and easily
understandable; this important for building
public support behind the goals.
 But, they need rethinking in the following
areas for effective implementation

3. Rethinking Pro-poor policies
beyond 2015
 Recent events have shown fragility in growth
performance and the threat to attaining the
MDGs;
 Income inequality and the associated social
tensions (Kenya)
 Vulnerability to External shocks ( Food crisis
and Financial crisis)
 The reversal of gains in just six months in
case of the Financial crisis

3. Rethinking pro-poor policies after
MDGs (contd..)
 Refocusing targets: the focus should be on the
following two encompassing goals.
 Focused Goal 1: Promoting growth
 wealth creation is a perquisite for redistribution,
investment, acceleration of the increase in living
standards
 growth targets should show progress in areas beyond
education, and health to include infrastructure, etc..
 But, focusing on growth allows optimal use of
resources.

3. Rethinking pro-poor policies after
MDGs (contd..)
 Focused goal 2: Reducing inequality
 rising inequality is a major constraint to wealth
creation and poverty reduction
 Reduction in inequality increases the gains
from growth across cross-section of society and
regions
 Lower inequality promotes social justice and
stability

Rethinking Pro-poor policies
beyond 2015
 Focus on Fragile States
 Threat to MDGs is the existence of fragile
states
 Agree that aid is more effective in good policy
environment BUT we need to rethink
approach to fragile states.
 Cost is enormous once they fall into
fragility(Somalia,DRC,Zimbabwe). Should we
rethink PBA?
 Action may be needed beyond regional effort

3. Rethinking Pro-poor policies
beyond 2015…
 Broaden Goal 7: Sustainable Growth
 Climate change remains a threat to
sustainable development
 Recognise the external shocks that pose a
big threat to sustainable development
 Rebalance growth strategy between social
and infrastructure

3. Rethinking pro-poor policies after
MDGs (contd..)
 Better definition of policy instruments
 So far there is no clear mapping from policy
instruments to targets
 no information on the sensitivity of targets to
instruments
 no defined intermediate targets
 as a principle, the fewer the targets, the easier the
implementation & monitoring
 Another major problem in the current setting is lack
of adequate control over the policy instruments:
 Poor policy alignment
 Weak harmonization of aid policies

4. Concluding remarks
 Experience from SSA suggests that the
popular policy action to reach the MDGs is to
scale up government expenditure/ODA in the
delivery of basic social services.
 Little attention has been paid to economy-
wide effects of interventions and interactions
across interventions.

4. Concluding remarks (contd)
 Some progress in MDGs can be traced back
to involvement of large donor resources.
However, aid-driven progress towards the
MDGs raises concerns of sustainability of
targets (risk of deterioration of targets after
aid).

4. Concluding remarks (contd)
 As we look forward beyond 2015, it is
imperative to rethink pro-poor policies in
terms of:
 Instrument-target alignment,
 Prioritization of targets,
 Sequencing,
 Greater coherence of financing with overall
development strategy of each country.