KATHMANDU, DEC 10 - A senior World Bank official has said that various studies have reckoned improving public service delivery as one of the most powerful tools to combat with the widespread global poverty further underlining the need to enhance accountability to ensure effective service delivery.
Delivering a lecture on "World Development Report: Making Services Work for Poor People" today, Jeffrey Hammer, a member of the team of authors, said that failure to reach the services to the needy people has been one of the major causes of poor outcomes of anti-poverty efforts in the past. "Such shortcomings can be corrected by empowering monitoring mechanism and enhancing discipline among the service providers," he remarked.
He further stressed on the need to develop a system that inputs the voices of poor people and properly incorporates them while making policy level decision. He also underlined the need of measures to prevent pro-poor public spending from falling into the hands of rich people.
On the occasion, Dr Shanker Sharma, Vice Chairman of the National Planning Commission (NPC) said that the government has recognized that improving service delivery of basic services such as health, education, drinking waster and sanitation are most effective anti-poverty tools.
"Realizing the fact the government has increased budget for basic services to 42 per cent of the total development expenditure from around 20 per cent some one decade ago," Sharma said claiming prioritisation of program as an effective way to maximize the utilization of public spending.
Stating that the government has already enforced expenditure tracking mechanism in some sectors, Dr Sharma said that decision to hand-over some activities related with the health and education services to local community have started bringing encouraging results.
Vidhyadhar Malik, Secretary at the Ministry of Education shed light on various aspects of reform process being under taken by the ministry and said that the assessment made recently over the primary schools handed-over to community has showed encouraging outcomes.
Similarly, Bhoj Raj Ghimire, Secretary at the NPC Secretariat said that the planers and policy makers should take responsibility for failing to reduce poverty and to raise voices of poor people.Posted on: 2003-12-11 04:24

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