Positive Response
THAT Nepal’s development partners have
pledged to support the government’s poverty reduction approach is bound to gladden
the heart of all those who have been involved in the Nepal Development Forum-2002 where
the promise was made. Finance Minister Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat told media Thursday that
besides endorsing the approach to poverty reduction, donors have expressed their support
to the new Foreign Aid Policy which however is currently undergoing some fine-tuning. He
said that in general donor agencies had positively responded to the Tenth Five Year Plan,
Poverty Reduction Strategic Plan and Mid-Term Expenditure Framework, while emphasising
their effective implementation. There has been a great amount of uncertainty regarding an
extra external support that the government had been seeking in light of the new budgetary
requirements engendered by the current law and order situation. The government had pinned
much hopes on the NDF meeting to convince its development partners that Nepal’s need
for additional support from donor agencies was crucial in this time of economic crisis.
Having to fight terrorism while at the same time meeting new development challenges had
clearly put the government in a budgetary fix. Thus in the run-up to the present NDF
meeting, which concluded Thursday, government officials have been articulating
vociferously the new needs that donors could be kind enough to consider. At the
inauguration of the NDF meeting, Prime Mniister Sher Bahadur Deuba himself made a strong
case for Nepal’s new budgetary requirements and promised measures to address various
issues of governance, the weaknesses in which have been time and again pointed out by
donor agencies.
It seems like donor agencies not only decided
to give a sympathetic hearing to Nepal’s plea for more support, but also favoured
making actual pledges of support at the meeting. They have pledged to help Nepal meet its
resource fund gap, which is estimated at an annual USD 500 million, to implement the
poverty reduction plan. But they have not made this pledge without emphasising that the
support depended on the continued commitment, effective implementation and results. Such
stress on results was not unexpected, as there has been a general feeling that successive
governments down the years have not been able to deliver much. And as Dr. Mahat stressed,
the donors had every right to question how their assistance was utilised and if we cannot
implement what we promise, he said, then we have no moral right to ask for additional
external assistance. With the worry of extra support behind now, all should get down to
work.
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