PRSP Strategies in Tanzania: Partnership for Poverty Reduction

Abstract

Tanzania has been a model country of PRSP and HIPCs initiatives. Tanzanian PRSP processes indicate that the bilateral, especially the northern Europran donors play an important role in public sector reforms and combine with IFIs to promote PRSP to help Governments focus their resources and to make them accountable for their actions. Therfore, most reforms developed in PRSP depend heavily on the principle of partnership. Traditinal conditionality, which has been infamous for coercive imposition of development agenda on the developing countries by IFIs, has been gradually being replaced by “post-conditionality” bench mark. While it should be emphasized that adjustment lending policy has been basically unchanged, many PRSP/HIPCs conditions have proven to be soft, poverty-forcused and process-oriented in providing a sense of partnership to the recipient Government.

New partnership guides people engaged in various public sector reforms such as Public Expenditure Management and Public Sector Reform Programme by uniting vigor of bilaterals, IFIs and the Goverment. The PRSP tools such as PER/MTEF and its relationship with Sector Programmes have various tasks and deficiencies, but they have matched well with the effects of these reforms. Uganda, the leading neighbor, provides more successful examples. While the merit of PRSP is to set significant development targets in rural poverty, observing targets seem technically and thematically difficult.

Though the public sector reforms have been progressed, the reformer President, B. Mkapa is not so satisfied with donor relationship because of European donors' intervention into domestic affairs. The voices of donors sometimes become intolerable to him since they pressurize the goverment to accept critical claims while providing budget support to the same body. PRSP processes concentrate on the administrative executives in the Ministries and tend to disregard parliamentarians. In near future, the close link with legislature and civil society is very important for PRSP to consolidate the support base in the country to continue the reform processes.