Poverty Reduction
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
January 26, 2004
A LITTLE over three years after consultations with the public resulted in the formulation of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper for Guyana, the Monitoring and Evaluation Unit of the Office of the President took the paper back to the people yesterday.
The goal: to get would-be beneficiary communities to become integrally involved not only in determining what resources under the Poverty Reduction Strategy will be disbursed in which area, but also in ascertaining how the resources will be optimally utilized.
The introduction to the Interim-Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper [ please note: link provided by LOSP web site ] describes the paper as expressing the Government's "strong commitment to reduce poverty in the context of accelerated economic growth and improved social conditions."
The paper has an interesting history.
After years of an anti-people socialist policy that took Guyana to the brink of economic collapse, surpassing Haiti as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, the PNC regime under late President Desmond Hoyte reluctantly agreed to accept an IMF/World Bank-stipulated Economic Recovery Programme (ERP).
But by 1989 the country had spiraled downwards to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
As a Commonwealth Advisory Group discovered in 1989 during a study of the Guyanese economy, the volumes of total output and exports stood at 20 percent below their mid-1970s level. The country's infrastructure and productive assets were in a state of disrepair. Nutrition and health standards had fallen sharply, with real GDP estimated to be "declining by 6 percent per annum."
As of the end of December 1988, the total recorded debt outstanding amounted to US1,764 million - seven times the level of exports; arrears amounted to about US$1,038 million - four times the level of exports; debt service payments falling due accounted for 75 percent of exports, and interest service payments alone accounted for nearly 30 percent of exports.
The ERP aimed to turn the nation's shattered economy around. But there was little in the "complex and difficult" ERP that addressed the human factor, even with the World Bank designing the medium-term food-for-work SIMAP, expecting its measures to cushion the country's most vulnerable groups from the ERP's adjustment strategies.
The Poverty Reduction Strategy Programme, conceived in 1993 by then President Cheddi Jagan to have a direct impact on living standards development among suburban, rural and hinterland Guyanese, hopes to correct the shortcomings of the ERP.
Yesterday's regional outreach consultations were meant to devolve responsibility for much of the programme's implementation and monitoring to the people in the communities who'll be benefiting from it.
The emotional contributions by participants at the Diamond consultation showed that people are eager to get involved, putting aside ethnicity and party politics and working together to drastically improve conditions in their communities.
With the on-going reform of the public sector seeking to improve service delivery, Guyanese expect that their enthusiasm and spirit of kinship and community will be rewarded with the now heavily bureaucratic public service getting its act together and supporting initiatives to reduce poverty and enhance people's livelihood.