March 25, 2007	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 5, 1428

KARACHI, March 24: Cross-border development programmes have a huge, yet underexploited potential to advance economic growth and reduce poverty, says a study of the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG).

According to the study, released on Thursday, such programmes can deliver strong results, such as providing reliable energy, managing shared water resources and combating the spread of communicable diseases. The opportunities for collaboration on issues of environmental protection are also said to be enormous.

The report considers existing multi-country projects to be successful, but laments that overall support for regional cooperation that is still limited that often lacked sufficient planning to make them sustainable.

During the past decade, only about three per cent of all international development aid went to regional programmes.

“Regional development programmes are well-suited to tackling cross-border dimensions of health, infrastructure, trade and the environment,” said Vinod Thomas, Director-General of IEG. “By providing stronger support for regional programmes, the international community could help countries find joint solutions to their common challenges,” he added.

“The development potential of regional programmes”, is a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of regional programmes conducted to date. The findings are based on evaluations of 19 regional programmes and a review of the World Bank's total portfolio of some 100 regional operations, the IEG study says.

Over the past 15 years, regional programmes have emerged as an instrument to tackle problems that are faced by neighboring countries. Regionally coordinated investments in roads and rail, for example, are helping some of the world’s 31 landlocked countries to connect to wider markets.

Regional programmes are beginning to integrate the supply and distribution of electricity so that small countries can get access to reliable, lower cost energy.

Cooperation across borders is also increasingly helping to control the spread of communicable diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS, and managing the 60 per cent of the world’s fresh water that derives from shared river systems.

The multi-country nature of regional programmes, however, makes them complex to design and implement. They require considerable trust among participating countries and consensus on the distribution of programme benefits and costs.

Thus the IEG study also finds that regional programmes often lack sufficient planning for the sustainability of programme outcomes.