Overall implementation record of NSAPR poor until 2006

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Shakhawat Hossain
The overall implementation record of the National Strategy for Accelerated Poverty Reduction (NSAPR) was poor until 2006 as success of the major strategic targets was only partial, a government review report said.
"Overall implementation of NSAPR so far is partial in the sense that some strategic goals along with their targets have been achieved, while in case of other strategic goals progress has either been slow or negligible," said the review prepared by the General Economic Division (GED) of the Planning Commission.
In its first ever review, the GED report noted that pervasive institutional weakness in macro and micro levels had emerged as the central cause of poor implementation of the NSAPR, which was launched under the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) in 2005.
The GED submitted the review report to the Chief Adviser and the Finance and Planning Adviser recently after scrutinising the main agenda in areas like employment, nutrition, local governance, criminal justice and monitoring.
The review report also took note of strategic blocks including macroeconomic environment for pro-poor economic growth, critical sectors of pro-poor growth and supporting strategies like promoting good governance and service delivery under the main agenda.

In general, the review said the NSAPR implementation progress under the strategic agenda for creating macroeconomic environment for pro-poor growth has been better than the implementation progress in the critical sectors like agriculture, water resources, health, and education and in the thematic areas like governance, service delivery and environment.
Economic growth process has not been pro-poor, said the report, adding that it indicated that fiscal monetary policy would need fine-tuning and more structural and institutional reforms would be necessary to achieve higher pro-poor growth.
It said irrigation facility has been expanded and irrigation efficiency increased, but agricultural GDP growth rate has been lower than the NSAPR projected growth.
It is plausible that agricultural GDP has not been increasing as projected in the NSDAPR due to poor delivery of agricultural research and extension services in the field level, said the report.
In human resources development, achievement in terms of primary school enrolment and gender parity is impressive, but the quality remained not satisfactory yet, high maternal and child mortality remained as challenges.
Poor institutional management in primary and secondary education and poor health service delivery are responsible for poor outcome in maternal and child mortality and poor quality of education.
The review noted that a comprehensive social protection framework as envisaged in the NSAPR had not been developed and implementation and monitoring capacity of social insurance provisions in the existing labour and employment laws were weak although the country had a commendable targeted safety net programme.
It is critical about the performances of the implementing agencies saying they have undermined the ultimate targets of the country's version of PRSP 'Unlocking the Potential'.
"The institutional weakness has been the main reason why the development ministries and agencies failed to prepare their roadmaps for implementation of NSAPR," said the report.
It added: "The planning, monitoring and evaluation outfits in most of the development ministries and agencies are too weak to prepare their roadmaps or action plans to implement their respective NSAPR strategic goals."
The government had to adopt the much-talked about NSARP in 2005 for the duration until June, 2007 to attract more aid by the donor agencies.
The period of the NSAPR has been extended until the current fiscal and a decision to prepare the next PRSP for 2008-2011 period has already been taken.