November 30, 2007	Friday	Ziqa’ad 19, 1428

ISLAMABAD, Nov 29: The Ministry of Finance and United Nation’s Development Programme (UNDP) here on Thursday signed an agreement of $6.49 million to improve capacity for monitoring pro-poor policies at the federal as well as at provincial levels.

Alvaro Rodriguez, Country Director UNDP and Waqar Ahmad, Secretary Finance signed the agreement on behalf of their respective organisations.

The signing ceremony was witnessed by Dr Salman Shah, Federal Minister for Finance and M Akram Malik, Secretary, Economic Affairs Division.

Under the agreement, the two-tier monitoring system would accomplish poverty outcome monitoring, poverty reduction strategies (PRS) implementation monitoring, anti-poverty expenditure tracking and gender budgeting.

The system would be supervised by federal and provincial PRS monitoring steering committees.

The monitoring system is aimed at augmenting government’s efforts to reduce poverty through macro-economic policies, improve national monitoring capacity and maintain gender-based credible statistics at the federal, provincial and district levels.

The system would focus on achieving the target set out in the PRSP in effective utilisation of anti-poverty public expenditure.

The PRSP secretariat has already institutionalised mechanism for quarterly tracking of anti-poverty expenditure and improved statistical systems to provide quality input to policy makers.

Another important factor included in the pro-poor monitoring of expenditure includes gender lens for understanding the contributions and needs of men and women.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Salman Shah said that Pakistan first launched an Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Papar (I-PRSP) in 2001 and then came up with a full PRSP-I in December 2003 for the period up till 2006.—APP