Donors’ Concerns
REGULAR meetings between government officials and donor representatives based
in Nepal help to make each party’s views on different things clear. As Nepal’s
yearly budget includes a sizeable amount of foreign assistance, it is but natural that
donor agencies here take a larger interest than it would otherwise be, in handling by the
government of the development assistance. It is a perfectly legitimate interest on the
part of donors that they would want the grant and loan assistance from their respective
countries and multilateral agencies to have the maximum impact on areas that the
assistance is intended for. It is the government’s duty, on its part, to keep them
informed of the measures taken to better utilise foreign aid and thus take them into
confidence. One such meeting took place on Monday between the government and the donor
community where the latter expressed their views on the recently-presented 2058-59 budget
and general development programmes being undertaken with foreign aid assistance. Though
they generally had good words to say about the budget, they seemed to also say that the
budget could be only as good as how effectively it is implemented. There can be no fault
on this view. True, some of the measures that Finance Minister Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat, who
responded to the donors’ concerns on Monday, has taken in this year’s budget has
the potential to improve certain sectors of the national economy, it is incontestable that
how these steps are taken to their logical conclusion in the months ahead will give the
final judgement on the budgetary document.
Quite naturally, most donors stressed that the government should give a
priority attention to poverty alleviation programmes that they said should incorporate
micro-finance, among others. The government has in the past admitted that poverty
alleviation programmes have not really taken off in an envisaged manner. Dr. Mahat sought
to convince the donors that coordination on this sphere for better delivery would be his
priority. The donors’ concern over the effectiveness of the poverty alleviation
programme should not be taken only as a perfunctory query from those who hold some of the
purse strings of the national exchequer. Ways to inject some thrust to poverty alleviation
programmes must exercise the minds of all governmental line agencies, and the Finance
Ministry has to take a lead role in it. It is to be hoped that in the current fiscal year,
poverty alleviation programmes will be implemented more effectively and the government
will have positive results to share on this front both with the general public and the
donors at the end of the year.
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