Robrecht Renard

The World Bank, Participation and PRSP: The Bolivian Case Revisited

Abstract‘Highly Indebted Poor Countries’ can receive debt relief from bilateral and multilateral donors if, among other things, they produce a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). Civil society must be involved in the formulation of the PRSP. It is expected that the participation of civil society will increase ownership, accountability, effectiveness and political performance. We argue that participation, as imposed by donors, is too ambitious to be workable and too vague to be monitored. The participation conditionality should be moulded to the specific history and institutional context of every country. We use Bolivia, generally regarded as an example of successful civil society participation in the PRSP, to make our point.

Assessing debt-to-health swaps: a case study on the Global Fund Debt2Health Conversion Scheme

The Debt2Health Conversion Scheme of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is used to reassess a range of recent initiatives that propose debt relief in exchange for spending in the health sector. The experience with debt swaps in the mid 1990s was far from positive, and recent improved insight in the economics of debt relief suggests extreme caution. We argue that the recent spade of debt swap proposals, even if targeting countries and debt titles that fall outside current major international debt relief mechanisms, share most of the design faults of previous initiatives. Proposals such as Debt2Health do not constitute efficient vehicles to increase net transfers to poor countries, to reduce the economic disadvantages of indebtedness, or to strengthen public health systems of partner countries. For debt relief to constitute a valuable mechanism to provide aid, it should be designed as a large‐scale and comprehensive operation, with spending earmarked to broad country‐established priorities, and reinforce rather than undermine national implementation systems.

An assessment of debt-for-education swaps. Case studies on swap initiatives between Germany and Indonesia and between Spain and El Salvador

A decade has passed since participants in the World Education Forum committed themselves to achieve, by 2015, the six Education for All (EFA) goals under the Dakar Framework for Action. Despite significant progress, some of the goals are likely to be missed by a large margin. Besides the absence of a well co‐ordinated multi‐donor approach in education, another major problem is the lack of funds: the EFA financing gap in low‐income countries is now estimated at around

Desk Screening of Development Projects: Is it Effective?:

16 billion annually. This article zooms in on debt swaps as one particular instrument of innovative financing. More specifically it assesses the macro‐economic impacts of debt‐for‐education swaps and their relation to the aid approach now advocated by the donor community. It does so on the basis of theoretical insights from debt relief and case studies on recent swap initiatives between Germany and Indonesia and between Spain and El Salvador. Our conclusions are mixed. On the one hand, typical debt swaps suffer from macro‐economic flaws and, in view of competition amongst sectors, have limited potential in narrowing the EFA deficit. On the other hand, our case studies suggest that debt‐for‐education swaps can be engineered to better comply with the needs of recipient ownership and could in the future address deserving niche problems.

Assessing debt-to-health swaps

Donor agencies rely to varying degrees on desk reviews by headquarter staff for the selection, monitoring and evaluation of projects initiated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). If information provided in the various documents submitted by NGOs is inadequate or incomplete then the reliability of desk reviews as a management tool for allocation of project funding becomes questionable. A study of European Union funding of NGO projects compared findings from a desk evaluation of a structured sample of 30 projects with those from a field assessment of the same projects. The findings show that a field assessment on the basis of more complete information from a wider range of stakeholders leads to a markedly lower scoring on most of the standard criteria of project evaluation. An important policy implication is that ex ante screening, monitoring and evaluation on the basis of project documents are an ineffective management tool for donor agencies if not backed up by substantive follow-up in the field. This article places such management tools in the wider context of principal-agent relations.

Monitoring and evaluation under the PRSP: Solid rock or quicksand?

for determining whether an intervention is appro-priate for large-scale eff orts to pre vent chronic disease globally .However, we believe that they were remiss in not including lifestyle interventions for diabetes preven-tion in their list of recommended strat egies.Dietary choices, physical inactivity, and excess weight—the targets of life-style inter ventions—are clearly causal evidence. Initially training expanded rapidly, but it declined by the end of the millennium. In 2005–06, fi nancial recovery plans for NHS debt resulted in widespread freezing of all non-mandatory training for primary care trusts. Research assessment exercises also reduced academic support for clinicians for research, systematic reviews, and clinical practice,